The system requirements of Outlast appear to be really low. Something like a Core 2 Duo @2.2ghz or even some 2000s era 2.2Ghz Athlon dual core. You’re using an 8th gen i5. Which is much faster per core. You probably aren’t even going to hit the modest 1.8Ghz turbo boost limit your manufacturer placed. I expect that you’re mostly maxing out the integrated graphics before hitting framerates which max out your CPU.

You’re fine.

Having lower than recommended spec will not cause damage to a computer. It just might mean that the game performance is not quite as good as you would hope.

The recommended spec from developers is not hard and fast. It’s their best guess of what will result in an acceptable level of performance so that people who purchase the game have a reasonable experience.

Back in my poor student days I used to to play the original Alien Vs Predator on a way below spec Cyrex based system and it would run at 15fps. But it was the best I had so I made do.

Laptops will often run quite hot, and so it would be a good idea to ensure you have it set up so it can get air properly (on a hard table, not on a cloth, or you lap). But modern computers have plenty of fail safes now.

If your CPU gets too hot it will just slow down until the temperature comes under control (it used to just BSOD back in the day). And at the very worst it will do an emergency shutdown long before it causes any damage and then just give you a warning when it boots back up. But it should only be doing this if there is a physical issue such as the vents all being clogged up with dust or the thermal paste having decayed.

So game happy.

often times minimum and recommended specs are PC parts that the developers had available at that time to test their games on. also what’s considered “minimum” is like a grey area. for example look at this madlad playing Witcher 3 at what it seems like 2 fps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVGCebGUpOc

my advice would be to buy the game and tinker with the video options to see if it’s still an enjoyable experience. if not you can always ask for a refund

I wouldn’t recommend it, in short term it ain’t actually gonna make any damage, but in the long run you might regret it. Heating up when playing games is absolutely normal, but overheating is a different thing. Usually when a laptop is heating up, its just hot in the base cover and in the ventilation system, if there’s one. If you can feel the keyboard is being unbelievably hot that’s obviously overheating. If you really plan to play games on the machine, like I always do, play on a cool area with good ventilation preferably with air conditioning. Windows might try to stabilize temps by dropping your frames and reducing performance but burning cpu isn’t rare at all. Anyway are you running at dual channel doing so improves performance (but not the heating). Also, you need a cpu to run anything.☠️☠️☠️☠️