I thought the introduction of The Outlast Trials’ previous Big Bad, a gun-wielding, man-child mobster named Francisco Barbie, was pretty ruthless of the development team at Red Barrels, but Season 4’s introduction of conjoined twins who work together to find and slaughter players is really taking it to another level.

Project Diarchy, The Outlast Trials’ latest season of content, is coming on July 15, bringing the new Prime Assets (major enemies) to the game, Otto and Arora Kress. The twins share a single body, but are conjoined in such a way that Arora is almost riding atop Otto’s shoulders, pointed in another direction, thus giving the killers more coverage when they’re prowling for players in shadows, lockers, or barrels.

Otto wields a chainsaw, while Arora lobs toxic chemicals at players. Together, they have a 360-degree field of vision, which will make sneaking around much harder. Red Barrels says the pair combine to make up “the most difficult Prime Asset [players] have yet faced.”

With a new season tends to come a new map, and that’s true once more. This time, players will be exploring a shopping mall, which will host both the new Trial, or main mission, Kill The Politician, as well as additional MK-Challenges, which play out like shorter missions in similar environments.

The new season will also come with a new catalog, the game’s free battle pass-like system of gruesome cosmetic rewards, as well as additional paid cosmetics, which this time will be split into four solo packs for $5 each rather than the typical $20 pack for a set of four. This will let players pick and choose the skins they like most, so they needn’t buy the whole set just to get one or a handful of the skins they sought.

Along with all of that, the game’s endgame missions return in a new form. Rebirth 2.0 adds co-op options to the experience, unlike the previous version that forced players to play the game solo. Rebirth can take place on any of the major maps in the game, so it won’t be the same mission each time anymore, and it will be played in mirror mode, borrowing a popular, albeit unexpected, feature from Mario Kart.

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“It’s something that we discuss pretty often when we’re coming up with new trials,” narrative designer Jonathan Morrell told me. “Within the company, it’s just [about] trying to find that line that we need to tiptoe. Someone will suggest something, and even internally, we’ll go, like, ‘I don’t think we could do that.’ Or like, ‘Maybe that’s a little too much, even for us.’ And it’s kind of like we go back and forth until we find that line. And so far, at least, it seems like we haven’t overstepped it, which is cool, because I agree that there aren’t many games out there that are as graphic or thematically disturbing as The Outlast Trials.”

Community manager Rosemarie Sarno added that the team wants to “always try to keep it different enough that we know that no other game would do this.”

The Outlast Trials Season 4 update arrives for free on July 15, though the sound of the chainsaw might cost you some hours from your sleep schedule.

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