Outward is a PC open world RPG adventure defined by human needs - thirst, hunger, exhaustion - and the ways in which you satisfy those needs. Playing it reminded me of listening in on my survivalist friends’ conversations about water purification, protein bars, and backpacks. This is a game for folks who refuse to buy the latest RPG until the Steam community cobbles together a decent hunger/thirst mod.

A biological and financial economy

You start the game under immediate financial pressure. One of your ancestors was a jerk, and so your village has levied a monthly tax against your entire bloodline. You got shipwrecked while trying to land a big score, killing some of your fellow townsfolk in the process. The town demands a huge fee which you have five days to pay off, or they will take your family home.

Other RPGs would immediately throw a quest line at you, where a shady character offers to pay off your debts in exchange for assistance. Not Outward. Outward presents a set of circumstances, a bunch of helpful shopkeepers with tutorial information, and says “Go earn some money.” Rudderless and scary, it felt almost exactly like graduating from college. I grabbed a crappy backpack, a few supplies, left my hometown, and almost immediately was savaged by hyenas (in game, not real life, though that’s almost exactly what moving to NYC feels like).

If you screw up and don’t show up with the money? You lose your home, and it becomes a soldiers’ barracks. Now if you want to rest in town, you either have to sleep outside on your makeshift bedroll like a fantasy hobo, or pay silver to rest at the local inn. I found it impossible to get that much money together in time, because I was constantly paying for food, bandages, and gear to survive long enough outside the city walls to bring back goods to trade.

The economy of the game revolves around meeting your biological needs. The starting area of Chersonese is full of wildlife to slay for meat. There are berry trees everywhere. It’s not hard to survive (I was almost never at risk of starving to death or dying of thirst), but it’s not easy to get ahead financially.

The game is simultaneously capitalist and anti-capitalist. By centralizing human needs, it creates a game environment where you’re constantly thinking about shelter, fresh water, and your next meal. Silver coins aren’t just the ticket to better gear - they’re how you survive.

At the same time, by levying bodily taxes on your progress, traveling long distances feels like a true achievement. You work hard trading hyena hides and preserving their meat so you can get to the things that really matter - exploration and beautiful vistas. Your job is a means to an end, not an end in itself. At one point, I climbed a magical purple mountain, looked out on the fields of Chersonese and felt like an epic badass. Then I was knocked unconscious in two hits by a giant rock monster.

Outward told me I could learn how to use magic on this mountain, but it didn’t tell me that I had to defeat a rock monster to do so. And that’s how Outward rolls. It doesn’t tell you what to expect. It encourages you to prep as much as you can, and then tells you to explore. Did something go wrong? Come back and try again.

For a game determined to be hard on you, Outward doesn’t perma-kill you if you lose all your health in combat. Heck it doesn’t even roll you for your silver. Instead, you get dragged to the entrance of the dungeon or you get brought back to your home city by a friendly passerby. Those murderous hyenas? They dragged me to their den, which I promptly exited, and ran my injured butt all the way back to my hometown.

Combat

Combat, usually central to the RPG experience, feels like a sidenote in Outward. You have a primary attack, a secondary attack, a guard action, and a dodge. Every action costs you precious stamina, which regenerates over time.

You also get some special combat skills, but their cooldown is long and their stamina costs are high, so I didn’t end up using them very often. Also, most enemies seem to be slower than you, and if you don’t want to fight, you can run away. The message of the game seems to be “Why worry fight when you can micromanage your supplies instead?” I’m only being mildly sarcastic. The crafting system in Outward is as deep as its combat is shallow.

Speaking of the crafting system, you have to get very good at making the essentials very quickly. Cooking food makes it resist spoiling for longer, and prevents food-borne illnesses. Linen cloth can be turned into life-saving bandages. Boiling river water makes it drinkable. I generally despise crafting systems, but survival required that I engage with Outward’s. A little tip: if you want to refill your lantern with oil, you need to combine the two items in your crafting screen.

As if this game needed to feel more like a post-college simulator, if you experiment with combining food items and screw up, you end up with food waste, which will make you sick if you eat it. You have no choice but to throw it away. While realistic, I’m not a fan of how this discourages experimentation.

Progression?

You don’t gather experience points and level like you do in other RPGs. Instead, you learn combat skills from trainers and improve your gear, which makes you more formidable, but it doesn’t have levels or XP per se. What separates a rookie and a veteran player is their knowledge and gear. If you want to carry more equipment (the difference between life and death / poverty and profitability), you don’t raise your strength attribute (you don’t have one), you buy a better backpack. If you want to hit harder, you buy a better weapon. Progression in Outward means getting rich and investing in gear.

Navigation

Outward also requires a degree of land navigation skill. You get a map of the world but no marker indicating “you are here”. You’ve got to navigate the world using your compass and tall landmarks. This requires constant attention to your heading, and if you end up sprinting away from a fight, you can find yourself completely lost - not unlike real life.

On the plus side, you won’t die a death of a million icons. If you see something weird in the distance, and your map doesn’t tell you what it is, then you have to actually go check it out. Is there a quest there? Is it dangerous? (It’s almost certainly dangerous.) Who knows? Go explore it and find out. You also can’t mark the map. I’d love to say “Hey, crazy mantis demon things up in here” to remind myself to avoid an area, but I can’t do that.

Also, the game doesn’t auto generate a map of internal areas as you explore them, which, while realistic, sort of stinks. It ended up lost in a warren full of troglodytes at one point, running in circles, desperately avoiding fights as I looked for the exit (Luckily, I died of infection, and then the game dropped me at the entrance to the dungeon).

Odds and ends

The game doesn’t pause unless you go to the menu and actually hit the pause button. You can’t actually pause to change your key binds or adjust your graphical settings. So if you’re adjusting your shadow settings and texture quality, and a hyena shows up, guess who’s got a rickety old backpack full of rotten berries and is suddenly in a fight? You, my friend.

You can dodge, but you can’t jump. The game is fairly forgiving in terms of what you can climb up and over, but in a game whose design philosophy seems couched in gritty realism, excluding a jump button felt weird. Invisible walls also prevent you from falling off of ledges or walking into lakes or oceans. After all the impromptu dips I took in open world games like Far Cry 5 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, I do wish I could swim in this game.

Where you store stuff changes its effect on your encumbrance. Gear and items are either equipped, in your pockets, or in your backpack. If your backpack is overloaded, you’ll move slower. But if you move a few items to your pockets, you can carry the same total amount of gear without slowing down. Is it realistic, because a well-balanced load is easier to carry? Or is it less realistic because 50 pounds is 50 pounds, no matter what? I can’t decide if I like this or not, and I suspect your mileage may vary.

The journal system is meager at best. There’s very little information that helps you handle quest tracking or directions to your destination. Given the negative reactions I saw to Divinity: Original Sin 2’s enhanced journal system, that might be intentional. Some folks seem to like taking out of game notes to handle in-game situations, and I can’t fault them for that. Keep a little Moleskine nearby if you want to keep close track of your Outward quests and the accompanying information. That’s not my jam, but it might be yours.

There’s a bit of T&A in some of the in-game art, which feels retro in a disappointing way. Given that the game doesn’t really deal with sexuality at all, this cheesecake felt pointless. We’ve largely moved past the chainmail bikini era in fantasy art; why are we bringing it back now?

Conclusion

In the end, this wasn’t a game designed with me in mind. I’m more of a Diablo 3 / Dragon Age:Inquisition-type gamer. I want to devastate hordes of monsters with visually dazzling attacks. But Outward will satisfy gamers who are into slower, more methodical, exploration-based RPGs.