Part 1! We quickly find out that there is much more to do in this game than just Looking Outside, which is a twist I could have never predicted when first buying this game.
Extra Notes
-Our Neighbor, Sybil, is our primary means for saving our progress. On Easy mode, the game regularly auto-saves as you go from room to room in the Apartment building, but on Normal mode we can only save via Sybil. Sybil will save our progress whenever we either A.) Advance time by at least one hour while exploring or B.) go to bed to advance to the next day.
-Look Outside features a limited amount of time to complete the game in. Each new room we explore, fight we get into, and activity we engage in while at home advances the in-game clock. We have 15 days to complete the game and get an ending in, otherwise we get the standard ending for waiting out... whatever's happening outside.
-Among the activities available in Sam's apartment, we can play video games (he just like me fr fr), screw around on our computer, cook, brush our teeth and shower. We'll gain a handful of new activities as we progress in the game. Some of these activities have more practical applications such as healing ourselves or creating battle items to use, while others serve to balance out our hidden "Sanity" stats. Displayed nowhere in the games main menus are the stats Morale, Calm, Social, Hygiene, Energy and Hunger. Of these stats, Morale and Social don't seem to do anything. Calm determines if Sam is anxious or not. Should Sam become Anxious, he gets a penalty to all experience he earns. Most things you do in the apartment improve Calm, so you should rarely have to worry about this. Hygiene prevents Sam from becoming Stinky if its high. Being Stinky has some drawbacks, but I'll wait until I can demo it before going over them. Energy is the first of these that has no number. Should you neglect to sleep at day's end, Sam can become tired which will penalize all his core battle statistics. Energy can be restored simply by going to bed, though you are never forced to actually sleep in this game. Hunger also has no number representing it. Should you go one day without eating anything, Sam will become Hungry which will reduce his max HP. Should you go another day without eating, Sam will become Starving, reducing his HP further. Like Energy, you're never forced to top this off but the penalties can be quite harsh. For the most part, playing the game normally will result in these stats never being a problem, and by Day 3 I never see Sam feeling anything other than Great.
-Bringing it back to point 2, entering areas previously unexplored causes time to advance on the clock. This means that early on time will be advancing quite rapidly, but we don't lose any time when backtracking through areas we've already been to. This includes areas that maybe we just walked into but immediately left. Another smaller thing that advances time is getting into fights. When engaging in combat with an enemy, time will advance on the clock. I'm not sure if this is a one time thing for if you get into an encounter but run away, or if the time advances only when you successfully kill an enemy, but it's a fairly minor usage of your limited time either way.
-We get our first weapon upon entering the opened apartment the blood trail leads to, a Baseball Bat! This is a Crush type weapon that affords us the skills Power Smash and Homerun. Every weapon in the game has a distinct damage type and offers us different skills to use (so not all Crush weapons have Homerun for instance, though the majority do have Power Smash). The main weapon damage types areSlash, Crush and Pierce, with guns having the Missile damage type. Every enemy has distinct resistances and weaknesses, with resistances greatly extending the length of battles, so it's good to have a variety of weapon types at your disposal. Pick up every weapon you come across!
-Other damage types include Fire, Cold, Acid, Explosive and Corruption. The first 4 are mostly found via single use combat items, while the last one is a special type exclusive to one weapon in the game.
-As far as your battle stats go, these are largely influenced by your equipment. Level ups do give incremental increases to your core stats, but only a point at most and sometimes nothing at all. Besides the standard HP and Stamina (which functions as MP in this game), you have Attack, Defense, Ballistics, Bullet Defense, Agility and Luck. Attack is the main statistic for Melee weapon and Ballistics is for Guns. Defense is the primary stat of your armors, while Bullet Defense is occasionally increased along side it. Not many things in the game use Gun based attacks, so Bullet Defense is a largely ignorable stat. Agility determines turn order, with higher Agility making it much more likely you'll go first, though there is some randomness to turn order in this game. Luck directly correlates to your crit rate, so at the game's offset you'll essentially never crit but it becomes a pretty regular thing by the late game. Critical hits deal 1.8X damage. It was originally 3X when the game first launched but that was way too powerful and it got nerfed within the game's first patch.
-Our first encounter is largely scripted and it's not worth using your skills on. Just swing away and the Wounded Neighbor is toast.
-Be sure to get that Knife, it's quite good for this stage of the game!
-Weapons can break, with each weapon having a percent chance to become Damaged when being used. Skills have a much higher chance of causing Weapon Damage. If a Weapon is Damaged twice, it breaks altogether and is gone permanently. Weapons breaking is rather annoyingly a strictly RNG based mechanic, though a recent patch has mitigated the effects of this system to make it less of a pain in the ass. Weapons that being used for the first time have a number of "Safe Hits" that divide the break chance by 10, with sufficiently low chances skipping the calculations for weapons breaking entirely. Unique weapons that we'll find later have a greater number of these "safe hits" to work with and should seldom break on use. Prior to the 1.03 update, it was not uncommon for people to have weapons start breaking on them right away, including rare and limited weapons that take quite a bit of effort to get!
-Coins can be used at the vending machine, though this mechanic is very undercooked and not super helpful. I just did it for demonstrative purposes.
-Vincent's apartment has several important items, the most immediately critical one being the Crafting Kit. The Guinea Pig Cinnamon will also be very important, but it won't be until the end of the game that we know why!
-You don't have to kill Vincent right now, but the Polo Shirt and Chicken Sandwich he drops are quite helpful.
-When returning to the apartment, you will get EXP awarded based on how long you were out. The reward maxes out at 8 hours outside of the apartment, so it's a good idea to return whenever the danger track reaches its end. As mentioned previously, you need to have spent at least one hour outside your apartment to get a save opportunity from Sybil.
-There is a very finite amount of EXP in Look Outside, so you should take every little bit of it you can get! The highest level I've ever managed to reach is 18, and the final level up was obtained off the final boss of the game.
-With the Crafting Kit from Vincent, we can combine a variety of items together to make battle items. I use the cloths we picked up to make some Molotovs, which are very handy for the Grinning Beast fight. There are other important items to create, but we lack the materials for them currently. You can also make Healing items with the crafting kit.
-Certain food items we collect need to be prepared at home. Meals restore a decent amount of HP and STM, and restore our invisible hunger stat. Normally if Sam is solo or only has one roommate, you'll also get some Leftovers from your meals, which restore a small amount of HP and STM themselves when used from your items. The game was being a little buggy here and didn't produce them for me initially.
-When spending time at the apartment, you'll occasionally get knocks on your door. Answering the door can result in a variety of encounters, most positive but some are dangerous. In this instance, we got the injured man William, who will ask for a medical supply and give us rewards in turn if we can provide them. Look closely at him through the peephole whenever he shows up though...
-Door encounters seem to be seeded, although the exact way the game determines this I'm not sure. What I can tell for certain is that if you save your game, advance time until a door encounter happens and then reload your save after, you'll get the same door encounter every single time if you take the same actions.
-Floor 2 is the only accessible area to us once we unlock the stairwell. Take note of the Astronomer, he's very important for most of the game's endings. Killing him would lock you out of those, so uh don't do that.
-Most NPCs can be attacked, and largely you just do this if you want to be an asshole. There is one NPC who can be killed for a pragmatic reason, but the game unintentionally punishes it harshly due to a bug I'll go over later.
-You don't need to talk to Jeanne, but raiding her stuff is pretty helpful. Keep that request for her Laundry in mind though!
-You can run from the Grinning Beast, but you'll get a similar result to what happened when I went for the gun first. It's better to fight it out.
-The Grinning Beast is quite tough, but if you do it the way I did you'll win 100% of the time. Stun her on the first turn, and even if she recovers right away she does nothing on her second turn so that's no issue. After stunning her, throw both your Molotovs. If you're at full health, you'll survive her multi-bite attack. Toss a throwing knife after it, and you'll win.
-Leigh serves as our first trader of the game, and she can be a nice way to unload your junk and pick up some spare supplies. The pistol bullets in particular are quite nice. She never restocks though, so it's best to just get the useful stuff purchased, and then recruit her after! You'll never be able to trade with her again if you recruit her, but she's far more helpful as an ally.
-Leigh has slightly better stats across the board than Sam, especially in terms of HP. She also can transform back into the Grinning Beast when in battle. This will berserk her for one turn and make her attack her own team, but she'll be fully controllable after that berserk turn passes. The Grinning Beast has a power double attack as its standard attack strike and Leigh learns a variety of Skills she can only use in Grinning Beast mode as she levels. I'm not a huge fan of using the Grinning Beast, but it can be helpful for the handful of longer battles in the game. The Grinning Beast used to completely suck, as it set Leigh against you for an insane three turns. Most battles in Look Outside don't make it past the second turn, so using the Grinning Beast was often just actively handicapping yourself.
-We get our first Gun after the Grinning Beast event, whether we run or fight it out. Guns have fantastic base power, but your Ballistics stat basically never increases from Leveling so guns have very static power. They also require ammo to use, obviously, though the game is decently generous with bullets. This pistol has a multi-shot technique, firing 3 bullets for a measly 2 STM. It's far and away our best damage dealing option right now, but should be used with caution as any shots in excess of what it takes to kill an enemy are still consumed. Guns can be reloaded within battle or out of battle from the Skills menu. It took me until my third playthrough to realize the latter because I am a rube.
-You could go for an alternative trade with Lyle for the photo paper, but why deny him happiness?
-The Crosswords we get from Lyle are one of the premier ways of wasting the clock in the apartment. You can do one hour crossword sessions to try and fish for door encounters, though the book does eventually run out of puzzles to solve. Rather amusingly, crosswords seem to wildly accelerate the decay of your Hygiene stat.
-You can kill Lyle to access his Dark Room, though this is not at all necessary. Just be sure to keep that photo from developing...
-We can play video games at the apartment to gain EXP, restore Calm and potentially learn new skills! The party members we get throughout the game all have different video games they are interested in and can play along with Sam to also get EXP. Leigh likes Wizard's Hell so that's the one I went with for demonstrating the mechanic. Each play session takes some time on the clock, usually 2 hours. Every video game has a specific number of sessions needed to finish it for the skill.
-Besides Wizard's Hell that we got from Vincent, we start with Super Jumplad, Mad Wheels 97, Myrmidon and Screamatorium if we check the shelves off to the left 4 times in a row. Of the 20 games available to collect in Look Outside, Super Jumplad and Madwheels 97 teach the best skills by a mile, so you don't have to engage with this collection quest too much if you won't want to. If you're curious, Super Jumplad takes 2 sessions and 4 in-game hours to finish, while Madwheels takes 5 sessions and 10 in-game hours to finish.
