![]() But, at the end of the game, Knoth says he killed all his kids so it wouldn't make sense that he left Val to live. Knoth's promiscuous (and violently forceful) behaviour and the words could mean that Knoth is a hypocrite and a liar. One of Val's lines involve "I watched my father fuck your god to death!" Now, I don't really believe AT ALL that Knoth and Val are related. In the game, our protagonist, Blake, first learns about Val through messages unless you skipped it, then you met Val when the Heretics kidnapped Lynn, his wife. Now let's focus on Val (since that's what this topic is about). The cult has a dictator named Sullivan Knoth, or Papa Knoth as he's called, and the Heretics have Val. You have to find your wife as you try to survive from two types of crazies: the Christians (a Christian cult, that is) and the Heretics. You play as a cameraman named Blake who is abandoned in the middle of nowhere because of a blinding light that crashed your helicopter. When I finally got around to playing Outlast 2 late last year, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, not only was the game a finely crafted adventure that fixed many of my complaints with the original Outlast, but that it also packed a hefty narrative punch.Let's first talk about the plot. The entwined stories of a journalist rescuing his wife from a doomsday cult interspersed with flashbacks of a childhood tragedy he witnessed at a parochial school struck a chord with me. Outlast 2 is a bit of a mess with its themes, but that doesn’t deprive them of depth. Blake’s search for his wife leads him to uncover the religious cult of self-appointed prophet Sullivan Knoth, and the conflict between Knoth and a rebelling satanic cult led by a woman named Val. ![]() Knoth is given almost no depth as a character a purulent caricature of religious hypocrisy, he uses his post to manipulate his followers into heeding his every want, including copulation. He bends the words of the peaceful Jesus Christ into fear-mongering messages of hate, preparing his “flock” for the apocalypse and keeping a watchful eye for the Antichrist who heralds its arrival. ![]() In many ways, Knoth could be perceived as a thin parody of modern Conservative American Christianity. He turns a blind eye to his prejudices and sins, justifying them because - as the sole appointed - he alone is “truly forgiven.” Any mayhem or violence his sect causes to others is for the greater good, to protect the flock, and maintain his interests. There are coincidental alignments with self-forgiving conservative-leaning ‘Christians’ in America who somehow shrug off their support of people who bomb civilians or separate children from their mothers every Sunday. More than that, though, Sullivan Knoth represents modern Conservative Christianity’s views on sex. This is not strictly in the coital sense. Thanks to in-game documents we know that Knoth slovenly takes part in both consensual sex and rape of vulnerable female cult members, despite decrying the sexually immoral. I’m specifically talking about sex in a broader sense here, particularly as it pertains to cisgendered women and their reproductive organs. When Knoth learns that the antichrist is to be born from his flock, he orders every baby murdered. Before this revelation, abortion was a sin in the cult Knoth even encouraged sex as a way to grow the flock. ![]() It wasn’t until it affected him that abortion stopped being a sin and became a necessity to survive.
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