Outlast Games in Order: Release, Story Timeline & Trinity

There are three Outlast games plus one major story DLC, and the correct play order is not quite the same as the story order. In release order that is Outlast (2013), the Whistleblower DLC (2014), Outlast 2 (2017) and The Outlast Trials (2024). In story order The Outlast Trials comes first by decades, and Whistleblower wraps around the original game rather than following it. This guide covers what to buy, what order to play it in, what Outlast Trinity does and does not contain, and how brutal each platinum is.

Outlast Games in Release Order

This is the order you should play them in, whatever the timeline says.

Outlast and Outlast 2 never received native PS5 builds, so you play the PS4 versions through backwards compatibility. They run fine, just without a next-gen performance mode. The Outlast Trials is the only entry with a proper PS5 release, and both its PS4 and PS5 listings appear in store search, so check the Outlast series page or the SKU name before you buy.

Outlast Games in Chronological (Story) Order

Release order and story order genuinely differ here, and this is where most guides get vague. Here is the actual sequence of events.

1. The Outlast Trials. Set during the Cold War era, decades before anything else in the series. The Murkoff Corporation is running mind-control and brainwashing experiments on unwilling test subjects. This is the origin story for the company whose behaviour drives both later games.
2. Outlast: Whistleblower (first half). Waylon Park is a software engineer working inside Mount Massive Asylum. He is the one who sends the anonymous email that brings journalist Miles Upshur to the asylum in the first place. His story starts before the base game does.
3. Outlast. Miles arrives at Mount Massive in response to that email. The entire original game plays out here.
4. Outlast: Whistleblower (second half). Waylon's escape runs parallel to Miles's night in the asylum, then continues past the point where the base game ends. Whistleblower is the only entry that both precedes and concludes after another game.
5. Outlast 2. A separate story in rural Arizona, following cameraman Blake Langermann and his wife Lynn. Murkoff's fingerprints are on the events, but no characters carry over.

The practical takeaway: play in release order anyway. Whistleblower is built to be played after the original. It assumes you already know what Mount Massive is and what happened inside it, and its ending only lands if you have seen Miles's. Starting with Whistleblower spoils the base game for nothing.

The Outlast Trials stands alone, so it is a legitimate starting point if the co-op game is all you want. Its Murkoff references land harder once you know what that company becomes, but nothing in it is confusing on a cold start.

Is The Outlast Trials a Sequel or Not?

No. This is the single biggest source of buyer regret in the series, so it is worth being blunt about.

The first two Outlast games are single-player, linear, camcorder-driven horror. You have no weapons, a camcorder with a night-vision mode, and a finite supply of batteries. You run, you hide, you watch a story play out over five to eight hours and then you are done.

The Outlast Trials is a co-op multiplayer game for up to four players, built around repeatable trials rather than a single linear campaign. You take on objectives inside Murkoff facilities, unlock rigs and gear between runs, and replay environments with different modifiers. It runs on seasons: Red Barrels has kept shipping new Prime Assets, new trial environments and new challenge sets well into 2026, and the game is built to be returned to rather than finished.

Three concrete differences decide whether you will like it:

• It has no campaign. There is a framing story and there are cutscenes, but no linear plot to follow from start to credits.
• It requires an internet connection, even when you play alone.
• It is progression-driven. Time invested unlocks tools and cosmetics. The first two games have no progression at all.

If you are looking for Outlast 3, The Outlast Trials is not it. Red Barrels has said publicly, going back years, that a proper Outlast 3 will happen at some point. There is no confirmed release date and no announced platform line-up, so do not buy Trials expecting a sequel campaign.

Can you play The Outlast Trials solo, and is it worth it alone?

Yes on both, with a caveat. Every trial can be attempted alone and the game scales enemy pressure and objective load to a single player. Nothing is locked behind having three friends online.

Solo is also the scarier way to play it. Four players turn a Murkoff facility into a comedy of shouted directions. One player alone in the same building with a rig on cooldown is much closer to the tone of the first two games.

The caveat is time. Solo runs are longer, failures cost more, and the unlock grind is slower without teammates clearing objectives in parallel. If you want six tight hours of horror, buy Outlast instead. If you want something to return to for months, Trials holds up alone.

For where it sits against the rest of the modern field, our best PS5 horror games rundown compares it with the other co-op and single-player options worth your money.

What Outlast Trinity Actually Contains

Outlast Trinity is the compilation that confuses the most buyers. It contains three things, not three games:

• Outlast
• Outlast: Whistleblower (the DLC)
• Outlast 2

It launched in April 2017 alongside Outlast 2, first as a physical PS4 and Xbox One disc, and it is sold digitally too. The name refers to three pieces of content, not a trilogy of numbered games. Critically, Outlast Trinity does not include The Outlast Trials, which came out seven years later and is sold entirely separately.

Some storefronts also list an "Outlast Bundle" that pairs the first game with its DLC but excludes Outlast 2. Read the contents on the product page rather than trusting the name, because the two sit next to each other in search results.

The Cheapest Way to Play All of Outlast

There are only three routes to owning the whole series, and which one wins is a live pricing question rather than a fixed answer.

Here is the part most buyers get wrong. A bundle is not automatically cheaper. During big PS Store events, Trinity and the three individual listings all go on sale, but at different percentages and often on different schedules, so a steep cut on Trinity can lose to three steeper cuts on the parts. Trinity also loses outright if you already own one of the three, because there is no upgrade path and no partial credit.

So the method is:

1. Price Trinity, then price Outlast, Whistleblower and Outlast 2 individually, in your own region.
2. Compare each against its lowest-ever price, not just its list price. A 60% discount on something that regularly hits 85% is not a deal.
3. Add The Outlast Trials separately whichever way you go.

The Outlast series page shows current price, price history and lowest-ever price per listing, which turns that comparison into a thirty-second job instead of a guess.

Two more levers worth knowing. Horror catalogues get pushed hardest around the Halloween Sale in October and again over Black Friday, so those are the windows where this series bottoms out. And prices vary sharply by region, so if you buy across storefronts, /global-deals/ shows the same games priced everywhere at once. For the day-to-day cuts, /discounts/ and the wider /sales hub are where these listings surface.

On PS Plus: entries in this series have appeared in the Extra and Premium catalogues at various points, but the catalogue rotates constantly and nothing here is permanent. Check the live line-up rather than assuming. If you are weighing a subscription against buying outright, the PS Plus calculator does that maths, and for four short games that discount this deeply, buying usually wins.

Difficulty, Gore and Content Warnings

This series is extreme even by horror standards, and that is not marketing copy.

Combat does not exist. You cannot fight anything in the first two games. Every encounter is a chase or a hiding sequence, and the only tool you have is a camcorder whose night vision drains batteries. Players used to shooting back often find the first two hours unpleasant rather than fun.

Outlast 2 is the hard one. Its chase sequences are longer, its instant-death moments are more frequent, and its hardest mode strips out checkpoints entirely. If you bounce off the difficulty of the original, expect worse.

On content, specifics matter, because people search for this before they buy. Outlast 2 ships with its own on-screen warning covering intense violence, gore, graphic sexual content and strong language, and it earns all four. Its story centres on a violent religious cult in rural Arizona, includes depictions of and references to sexual assault, and its flashbacks deal with the abuse of children by a priest. Content was cut before release to hold an M rating, and several of those scenes were still criticised as exploitative by reviewers who otherwise liked the game.

The first game and Whistleblower are extremely gory, with graphic mutilation and one Whistleblower sequence regularly cited as the most disturbing moment in the series. The Outlast Trials is the mildest of the four, and it is still an 18-rated game about torture and psychological conditioning.

If any of that is a hard no for you, it is a hard no for this series. There are no difficulty toggles or content filters that remove it.

Trophies: What a Full Platinum Sweep Costs

Two brutal platinums, one long grind, and no easy wins.

Outlast locks its platinum behind Insane difficulty, the hardest setting with all checkpoints and saves removed. You must finish the whole game in one unbroken run without dying, carrying at most two spare batteries, against enemies that hear you sooner and move faster. Pausing is allowed. Dying sends you back to the very beginning. Most guides rate it around 7/10 and recommend a full practice run on Nightmare first.

Outlast 2 is worse. Its Insane run has no checkpoints either, and the platinum-breaker trophy asks for that run with no camera batteries used at all, in a game where large stretches are pitch black. Realistically you are memorising routes. Budget over 10 hours and several failed attempts.

The Outlast Trials is the opposite problem. It is rated around 3/10 for difficulty but it is a grind: trophies for being knocked down 50 times, for losing 10,000 total health, and for accumulating 10 hours of night vision. Roughly 20 hours if you are efficient, and all but a handful of trophies can be earned solo, though you do need to be online throughout.

Whistleblower has no separate list on PS4. Its trophies sit inside the base game's list, so the DLC counts toward the original platinum rather than adding one.

None of these belong on a quick-platinum shortlist. For something friendlier between attempts, the easy platinum list filters for genuinely fast completions, and Life is Strange games in order covers a series with a far gentler trophy curve.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Outlast games are there?

There are three Outlast games: Outlast (2013), Outlast 2 (2017) and The Outlast Trials (2024). There is also one substantial story DLC, Outlast: Whistleblower (2014), which expands the first game. All four are playable on PS5 and PS4.

What order should I play the Outlast games in?

Play them in release order: Outlast, then Whistleblower, then Outlast 2, then The Outlast Trials. Whistleblower is designed to be played after the first game even though most of it happens before and during it, and Outlast 2 tells a self-contained story with only thematic links to the rest.

What does Outlast Trinity include?

Outlast Trinity is a bundle containing Outlast, the Outlast: Whistleblower DLC and Outlast 2. It launched alongside Outlast 2 in April 2017, first as a physical PS4 and Xbox One disc, and it is also sold digitally. It does not include The Outlast Trials, which came out seven years later and is sold separately.

Is The Outlast Trials Outlast 3?

No. The Outlast Trials is a co-op multiplayer survival horror game set decades before the first two games, built around repeatable trials rather than a single-player campaign. Red Barrels has said a proper Outlast 3 will happen eventually, but no release date has been confirmed.

Can you play The Outlast Trials solo?

Yes. Every trial can be attempted alone and the game scales to a single player. It is designed around teams of up to four, so solo runs are harder and considerably more tense, but nothing is locked behind having friends online. An internet connection is still required.

Is Outlast Trinity cheaper than buying the games separately?

It depends entirely on which discounts are live. Trinity and the individual games go on sale at different percentages during the same PS Store events, so the separate items sometimes work out cheaper. Compare the current and lowest-ever price of each listing before you buy either way.

Four entries, one straightforward play order, and one bundle that does not contain everything the name implies. Check current and lowest-ever prices for each on the Outlast series page before you decide between Trinity and buying the parts.