While Outlast 2 is a highly enjoyable survival-horror with an amazing atmosphere almost throughout the whole game, it does have one annoying flaw: there are simply far too many enemies preventing you from taking the time to explore the environments and see all of the bizarre little details. In order to offer an alternative, as well as help out completely new players, developer Red Barrel has now released an easier "Story Mode" with less enemy encounters and more room to explore.

"It is still possible to die, but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their speed, damage and perception," reads the brief description on Steam. "We’ve also made tweaks to the pacing of the game to make more room for exploration, instead of chases."

I'm probably never going to play the new Story Mode as I feel a lot of the important tension is lost when the danger is removed, but I am still glad it's been introduced regardless. After all, having more options is always a good thing, especially when they cater to a variety of playstyles: from hardcore to casual.

"Also, we’ve taken the opportunity to reinsert some of the things we had to remove from the original game in order to get an M rating," the developers continued. "These changes are not drastic in our opinion and do not impact gameplay, but they had to be made to avoid an Adult Only rating."

What exactly these changes are, I'm afraid nobody outside of the developers currently knows, but I can only imagine it's something gruesome given that it pushed the M rating all the way to AO. I guess this is where the new and exploration focused Story Mode comes in quite handy!

Oh, and just in case you haven't already played Outlast 2, it's currently on a 66% discount on Steam. Have fun!