Overview
Are you a huge baby? Did you find the game to be excessively dark, whether you were scared of it or not? Do you want to totally break the game and cheat hugely? Do you just want to see the game environment a little better? Welcome, friend.
Intro and disclaimer
For starters, I should note that I was using this mod, as well as some other tweaks to the config files so that I was faster (which you can do yourself in OLGame.ini, under [OLGame.OLHero]) and never had to actually worry about batteries (same file and section, further down; change both instances of BatteryDuration to 9999.0), as well as not getting a huge headache from the film grain and motion blur and night vision effect (there are other guides already as to how to do this). I went looking for a way to change the brightness in game after I managed to die in Insane mode even with all the cheats, and never did find anything, so I just started changing numbers in one of the config files until something changed in game.
The disclaimer: Night Vision will become the worst option if you do this, but if you’re just worried about being able to see, and especially if you’re not trying to get all the notes (including the ones you have to film, in NV or otherwise), it shouldn’t be a big issue.
The config changes
This is pretty simple. Go to Documents > My Games > Outlast > OLGame > Config. Open OLGame.ini; making a copy of that file in the same folder as a backup is a good idea. Search for “DarkLight”. What you want to change is everything that starts with that. I put all of the DarkLightBrightness lines at 5.0, and all of the DarkLightRadius lines at 1500.0. Honestly, the brightness could probably even be more like 3, because in bright areas of the game it was pretty washed out and over lit at 5. Changing the gamma in-game might have changed that, but I was having a problem with applying any option change in the game; trying to do so made the game crash. Here’s an example of everything at brightness 5/radius 1500, and I think the gamma is at 1.67 or so:
That’s the very start of the game, if it wasn’t obvious. Having the camera up just adds the UI and the film grain effect, and NV is unaffected by the changes and is still incredibly dark.
There were a couple of instances where it looked really wonky with the bright lighting; Trager, in particular, seems to have his own lighting applied directly to him, because he wasn’t touched at all by my radiance:
It also works in Whistleblower:
I should note, however, that it broke near the end of the DLC. Once I went into the locker to hide from the Groom (and he was actually triggered to come find me), everything went back to the normal game lighting and stayed that way through to the end. I could get much brighter light for a moment when I had the camera up and toggled NV on or off, sort of a pulse like a camera flash, and that was enough to navigate by; I have no clue why it broke from that scene, but it was close enough to the end that I didn’t much care.
Conclusion
I hope this helps anyone who wants a little more light in the game! I love exploring in games using freecam/noclip once I’ve beaten them once, and seeing how different things work, and the light level in Outlast was the only thing keeping me from doing that. Yes, this takes the spooks and scares away. Yes, the game looks like an early PS2 game when you can actually see everything. No, I don’t wanna hear about why would I do this, why would I cheat, etc; I’ve already explained that. If you don’t approve of cheating, I’m very sorry. Why did you look at this guide, then?