The Outlast Trials is a 4-player co-op horror game from the Outlast team

The next game in the Outlast series is a four-player co-op horror game called The Outlast Trials. Developer Red Barrels announced its next project in a press release, confirming that The Outlast Trials is "still in the early stages of production" but that it plans to share more news about it soon. Until then, here's what Red Barrels is willing to divulge so far.

The Outlast Trials is set in the same horrifying fictional universe as Outlast and Outlast 2, but it will predate them by quite a bit: it's set place in the "middle of the Cold War era", so probably sometime in the late '60s or '70s. Players will be able to participate in The Outlast Trials on their own if they prefer the solitary experience of the previous games, though it's being designed to support co-operative play for up to four participants at once. Red Barrels also shared this art for the game, which includes the tagline "Where Freedom Ends".

The art shows three people all back to back in a dark room with a totalitarian-looking logo in the background. Each of the people is wearing a strange goggle apparatus on their face, a tagged bracelet, and a dark jumpsuit, while the one in the middle is reaching up to grab the outstretched hand of an otherwise unseen fourth person. The tagline and grasping hand motif line up with a previous teaser from Red Barrels.

The goggles might have you wondering if The Outlast Trials is also a VR project, but Red Barrels already shut that idea down in a comment on its official Facebook page.

“Our team is hard at work creating a new experience that will bring fear and anxiety to millions of players, whether they go through the experiments alone or with friends," studio co-founder David Chateauneuf said in the statement. “Now we’ve done our proof of concept, it is time to focus on content creation, variety… and gore."

Find more scares in our guide to the best horror games.