The Outlast Trials Season 5: Project Messiah Turns Fear Into a Religious Experience

Red Barrels is not interested in letting you feel safe. The Outlast Trials Season 5 update, titled Project Messiah, is live now and it might be the most unsettling content drop the game has had so far. The new season revolves around Sister Liliya Bogomolova, a cult leader who hides among mannequins in a snowcapped alpine retreat called The Resort. On top of that, there’s a new Trial built around sabotaging a VIP human auction, fresh MK-Challenges, the return of the Winter Kills limited-time event, a Permafrost mutator that punishes sloppy play, and major tweaks to the Invasion Experimental Therapy mode.

Season 5: Project Messiah at a Glance

Project Messiah is a full seasonal update, not just a small balance patch. Red Barrels has been steadily evolving The Outlast Trials into what the director once called an accidental live-service success, and Season 5 continues that trend with new content across almost every system. The update launched December 9, 2025 on all platforms, with patch notes confirming new enemies, environments, Trials, MK-Challenges, an event, and system overhauls rolled into one package.

At the center of it all is the idea of faith weaponized as control. The Resort is framed as a gaudy alpine retreat that doubles as a cult compound and VIP auction venue, dripping with religious imagery, wealth, and human exploitation. Sister Liliya’s presence ties those themes together, forcing players to navigate an environment where devotion, money, and violence blur into one more Murkoff experiment.

Meet Sister Liliya, Season 5’s Prime Asset

Sister Liliya Bogomolova, nicknamed the Praying Mantis, is the new Prime Asset introduced in Project Messiah. She’s a cult leader wrapped in ornate religious garb and an intricate mask that hides a scarred face, blending perfectly with the army of mannequins scattered throughout The Resort. Her entire design leans into one core fear: not knowing which statue in a room is just decoration and which one will suddenly lunge at you.

From a gameplay perspective, Liliya is built around ambush, reach, and immobilization. Patch notes describe her toolkit as focusing on surprise attacks from unexpected angles, long-reaching strikes that can catch Reagents who think they’re at a safe distance, and crowd-control grabs that force you into panic button-mashing to break free. She can reposition stealthily within Trials to set up new ambushes and uses mannequin placement and disguise to effectively become part of the scenery until she decides you’ve let your guard down.

The Resort: A Cult Vacation from Hell

The new Trial environment, The Resort, trades Murkoff’s sterile industrial corridors for a lavish but deeply unsettling alpine lodge. Official descriptions call it a gaudy alpine retreat, but in practice it’s a cult compound layered with religious iconography, high-end decor, and grotesque displays of wealth. Think mountain spa meets secret church meets black market human auction house.

Visually, early gameplay footage shows a mix of snow-dusted exteriors, candlelit chapels, ornate banquet halls, VIP auction rooms, and narrow corridors packed with masked mannequins. The map design leans heavily on line-of-sight tricks and misdirection, encouraging players to treat every figure as a possible threat. Sound design plays an even bigger role here than usual, with the Season 5 trailer emphasizing that being quiet and still is often your best survival strategy. If you’re the type to yell over proximity chat when nervous, The Resort is going to punish that.

New Trial: Despoil the Auction

Season 5’s headline Trial is Despoil the Auction, set within The Resort’s VIP auction hall. The premise is classic Murkoff cruelty: humans have become just another luxury commodity, entertainment for the ultra-rich. Your role as a Reagent is the negotiator, tasked with sabotaging the proceedings and ruining the lot as a new plaything goes up for sale.

Steam’s in-game description frames it in disturbingly matter-of-fact terms: Humans are just one more product, amusement for those with money to burn. A fresh plaything is up for auction, it’s up to you to ruin the lot. That translates into a Trial focused on infiltration, stealth, sabotage, and timing under pressure. Puzzles and objectives revolve around destabilizing the auction, tampering with evidence, disrupting proceedings, and likely deciding how much risk you’re willing to take to complete optional objectives versus just surviving Liliya and her cult.

New MK-Challenges: Fabricate the Scandal & Seize the Narcotics

Project Messiah also introduces two new MK-Challenges: Fabricate the Scandal and Seize the Narcotics. These are smaller, focused scenarios that remix existing environments for specific objectives, adding more variety to the mid-tier content between full Trials and Routine therapies. Fabricate the Scandal leans into propaganda and narrative control, casting you as the half-truth more honest than fact when evidence fails the agenda. Your job is essentially to assemble a story that will entertain the masses by shaping evidence to fit a preferred crime.

Seize the Narcotics appears to revolve around evidence collection in targeted zones, tying into the returning Winter Kills event and Permafrost mutator. Earlier community leaks suggested that new MK content would open fresh sub-areas in existing maps like laundromats and police evidence rooms, and Season 5 delivers on that by dropping players into specialized tasks rather than broad escape objectives. It’s the kind of content that rewards mastery of map layouts and encourages repeat runs.

Winter Kills Returns with Permafrost

Fan-favorite limited-time event Winter Kills is back for Season 5, split into two phases. Part 1 runs December 9, 2025 at 10 AM ET through December 23, 2025 at 9:59 AM ET. Part 2 immediately follows from December 23, 10 AM ET through January 6, 2026 at 9:59 AM ET. Players can expect familiar winter-themed cosmetics, event-specific objectives, and increased rewards for braving the enhanced difficulty.

The new twist is Permafrost, a variator that adds environmental hostility to Trials during the event. Patch notes describe Winter Kills as an experiment in hostile, unstable environments rich in both punishment and rewards, and Permafrost is designed to literally chill Reagents’ blood. While Red Barrels hasn’t gone into granular mechanical detail, expect effects like reduced visibility, movement penalties, extra noise from traversing snow or ice, or environmental hazards that punish sprinting and sloppy navigation. It’s the kind of modifier that makes already stressful scenarios feel suffocating in a good way.

Invasion Experimental Therapy Overhaul

Beyond new content, Project Messiah also reworks the Invasion Experimental Therapy system. Invasion lets other players (or AI stand-ins) intrude into your Trials as hostile entities, adding an unpredictable human element on top of Murkoff’s horrors. Earlier variations of Invasion had mixed reception due to balance and pacing issues, sometimes feeling more like griefing than a tense cat-and-mouse layer.

Season 5’s patch notes mention a major overhaul aimed at making Invasions more structured, rewarding, and less disruptive. While specifics vary by mode, the general direction focuses on clearer rules of engagement, better signaling when an invasion is active, tuned rewards for both invading and invaded players, and controls to avoid consecutive back-to-back invasions ruining a run. For players who enjoy the chaos, it should feel more like an intense feature rather than a random annoyance. For those who don’t, the tweaks aim to make the experience fairer and easier to manage.

How Season 5 Fits the 2025 Roadmap

Earlier this year, Red Barrels laid out a 2025 roadmap for The Outlast Trials that promised multiple seasons, major patches, new modes, cosmetics, and challenges throughout the year. Season 4 hit during summer with one of the biggest updates yet, and Project Messiah effectively anchors the late-year slot, lining up with the roadmap’s tease of continued content through Halloween and into winter.

The studio has embraced the live-service structure but frames it as a response to player demand rather than a pre-planned monetization strategy. In interviews, leadership described The Outlast Trials’ ongoing updates as giving the people what they want after the game found a larger and more dedicated audience than expected. Project Messiah continues that approach by deepening both the horror fantasy (cult compound, religious themes, human auctions) and the mechanical variety (new Prime Asset behavior, map, challenges, event mutator, and system reworks).

FAQs

When did Project Messiah (Season 5) release?

Season 5: Project Messiah launched on December 9, 2025. The update is available on all platforms that support The Outlast Trials.

Who is the new Prime Asset in Season 5?

The new Prime Asset is Sister Liliya Bogomolova, also known as the Praying Mantis. She’s a cult leader who hides among mannequins in The Resort and specializes in long-range ambushes and immobilizing attacks.

What is The Resort?

The Resort is a new Trial environment described as a gaudy alpine retreat that doubles as a cult compound and VIP human auction venue. It’s filled with masked mannequins, religious iconography, and tight spaces designed for ambush gameplay.

What is the Despoil the Auction Trial?

Despoil the Auction is Season 5’s new Trial where you play the negotiator trying to sabotage a VIP human auction. Humans are treated as luxury products, and your job is to ruin the sale while surviving Sister Liliya and her cult.

What are the new MK-Challenges?

Season 5 adds two MK-Challenges: Fabricate the Scandal, focused on shaping evidence into a salacious crime narrative, and Seize the Narcotics, centered around collecting contraband in targeted zones.

When does the Winter Kills event run?

Winter Kills runs in two phases: Part 1 from December 9 to December 23, 2025, and Part 2 from December 23, 2025 to January 6, 2026. The event brings back winter-themed content and introduces the Permafrost variator.

What is Permafrost?

Permafrost is a new variator added for Winter Kills that makes environments more hostile and unstable, increasing difficulty and risk but also improving rewards for players who adapt and survive.

Did Invasion change in Season 5?

Yes. Project Messiah includes a major overhaul of the Invasion Experimental Therapy mode, tuning balance, signaling, and rewards to make invasions feel more structured and less frustrating.

Is The Outlast Trials now fully live-service?

The game operates with seasonal updates, events, and ongoing content similar to live-service titles, but Red Barrels has described this evolution as a response to unexpected player demand rather than an original plan. Season 5 continues that ongoing support.

Conclusion

Project Messiah is The Outlast Trials at its most confident and cruel. By centering Season 5 around a religious cult aesthetic, a human auction Trial, and a Prime Asset who literally hides in plain sight as part of the furniture, Red Barrels taps into fears that go beyond jump scares. The Resort’s mix of gaudy luxury and ritualistic horror, the tension of not knowing which mannequin is about to grab you, and the moral disgust of treating people as auction lots all make Season 5 feel sharper and more focused than a simple new-map-and-enemy update. Add in the returning Winter Kills event with its Permafrost twist, fresh MK-Challenges for mid-tier play, and a much-needed Invasion rework, and you’ve got a season that doesn’t just add more content, it deepens the game’s identity. If you bounced off earlier seasons, Project Messiah might not suddenly convert you. But if you’ve been hooked on Murkoff’s multiplayer experiments since launch, Season 5 gives you a new cult compound to suffer in, a terrifying new predator to fear, and plenty of reasons to go back into the Trials. Just don’t get too comfortable around mannequins. In this Resort, the statues really might be watching you.