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Don’t you just love an adventure, when a character starts in his humble village and sets out to become so much more? From Frodo Baggin’s humble beginnings in The Shire, to Luke Skywalker going from farmer to Jedi Master, the greatest stories begin with the mundane and end with the fantastic.
Pick any RPG and you can live out this fantasy, but in these grand adventures, have you ever wondered what happens “off screen”? What about all the camping and the foraging for supplies in between the fights? Or the long, arduous treks between locations? Outward looks at the less glamorous parts of the adventuring lifestyle. Making use of its survival game systems, it challenges you to experience the finer, more realistic details of an adventurer's life and along with its fantastic sense of progression, lets you experience starting from nothing and evolving into a fearsome hero.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” to have an adventure you need a world to have it in. The world of Outward feels large and expansive, surprisingly, it has a much smaller surface area than Skyrim. The developers achieve this sense of scale by getting rid of quest markers and obfuscating the player’s position on the map.
To navigate the world of Outward you need to acquaint yourself with the various landmarks dotted around the world and by referring to the in-game signposts. This process of gradually building your own mental map feels immersive and thematic, and a key ingredient in the games fantastic sense of progression, you as a player evolve with the character as you slowly improve your geography of the world, at the beginning of the game its likely you will constantly need to open your map to orient yourself, by the end you will be a confident pathfinder and the first time you traverse the world without using the map you really feel like a seasoned ranger who’s spent years roaming the wilderness.
In another notable design choice for an RPG, there is no levelling system, and while you can buy better gear and pay for lessons to learn new skills from the various trainers around the world. You can't just grind your way to higher levels in this game, to get better you need to get out there and ply your trade as an adventurer, with no arbitrary stat boosts or overpowered abilities to unlock, the evolution of the character is intrinsically tied to you, the player. This creates an amazing sensation that you really are becoming a better, more skilled adventurer and not just cranking your modifiers up by grinding out experience points.
I began Outward hardly able to take on one bandit in a knife fight, by the end I had full plate armour and was so well versed in combat that I could confidently take on multiple enemies, and monsters that I had previously avoided at the beginning became minor inconveniences. I began as a scared, skittish looter and by the end I became a glorious knight, roaming the land vanquishing any evil I came across.
Part of the learning curve in Outward is realising that in this world, you really are nothing special. You are not a legendary hero, or the chosen one. The game wastes little time with a tutorial, instead you are thrown out into the world with nothing but basic supplies and a weapon, its then up to you to make your way; or don’t, the world of Outward will carry on with or without the players interference. This is reflected in the quest system, quests will time out and can fail if you leave them for too long, unlike other RPG’s, there is a sense of urgency present here, you can’t go round collecting and completing side quests forever before you decide to finally do the main quest. Some failed quests can alter the state of the world, so you need to be careful what you choose to ignore. You will need to use your time wisely, and it’s easy to miss things, however this makes every playthrough unique, and stops the journal from becoming a Ubisoft checklist.
Alongside your own emergent narrative, there is a story to follow. The writing is good, there are a few unexpected twists, and the quests can play out differently depending on your dialogue choices, and how well you carried out the mission. The main mission chain is slightly on the short side, however each of the three different factions provide you with a different questline and you will need multiple playthrough to experience them all. The timed quest system, orienteering and lack of levelling all combine to create this amazing feeling of adventure.
Outward is good at replicating the grand strokes of the fantasy hero. But what about the less glorious, day to day stuff?
This is where Outward goes from a good game into a great game. Interwoven into this fantasy RPG is a survival game, in fact you might call it his game a survival sim first and a fantasy RPG second. Much like real life, if you were about to set out on a long journey, you would need to prepare. In Outward you need to manage hunger and thirst, as well as your temperature and your tiredness. You can't just sprint around for weeks without eating, you will need to pack supplies before you set off.
Food will need to be bought, foraged, or hunted, you will need to collect firewood and set up your tent so you can camp overnight and rest, this does not guarantee safety though, you will need to keep watch during the night. All this as well as maintaining your weapons, brewing potions, and cooking your meals. You will need to locate sources of water, most of it is not fit to drink and will need to be boiled.
Doing all of this can sound like a lot, and systems like this have put me off in past games as micromanaging your characters needs can just be frustrating hurdle, but in a game about the journey and not the destination it really works. The various needs feel fair, unobtrusive, and only serve to add to the games fantastic sense of immersion instead of detracting from it, adding a crunchy layer of player agency and decision making.
Every time you set out on a quest it feels important and deliberated. Have I got enough food to last me? Or will I need to do some hunting while the sun is still out? Have I got enough layers on? Seasons will change in this game, and getting caught out at night in the freezing cold during winter is a death sentence. Inventory is handled by your backpack, a separate entity altogether that can be taken off (and left behind if you forget about it), you may want to take it off before combat, trying to fight with 30 kilos of equipment and supplies is difficult, you will be slow and unable to combat roll with it still on.
Prep-time before combat encounters is just as important as making sure you’ve got food and water; traps can be made using tripwires and any scrap you find and sometimes you will need to brew certain potions in order give yourself an advantage, some enemies will be nigh invincible without the right enchantments.
The survival and RPG mechanics really shine, however the games main drawback is in its combat. While you can prepare and make things easier for yourself, combat itself feels janky, hitboxes can be strange, and the animations are rather stunted. This means combat can be frustrating at times, even with preparation, especially when fighting multiple opponents.
This game is grounded in a gritty realism, and the way it handles ‘death’ is in line with all its other mechanics. Instead of a game over screen, when your HP reaches zero, you will be met with a random event that explains how you narrowly escaped death. You might get enslaved by the bandits that attacked you, dragged back to the lair of a beast or helped to safety by a fellow adventurer. This can shape your own story in all sorts of ways and makes losing less of an annoyance, but more of a narrative event within your own personal story.
You might think that this makes you invincible, but while you can't die and lose progress you will lose something you can never get back. Time. When you are defeated, a day of in game time will pass, this means those time sensitive quests I mentioned earlier can potentially fail. To add to this, you can't save your game in Outward, the game is constantly autosaving, so you won't be able to reload an earlier save, this means you are forced to live with every decision you make.
The survival aspects, organic progression, multiple questlines, and defeat scenarios means that every player will have an adventure that is unique to them, the different mechanics combining well to create fascinating emergent narratives. The game does not hold your hand and offers a lot of player agency. Preparing for adventures, not being able to ignore quests and no way of loading earlier saves means every single choice feels important, which makes it incredibly gripping.
However, the long treks, janky combat and dated graphics might dissuade many gamers. The game is described by its developers as an “adventurer simulator” and it does just that, and it does it well. If you’ve ever modded Skyrim to be more of a survival game, or ever wanted a realistic fantasy RPG, or would like a game that more accurately mimics the life of an adventurer in a fantasy world, even the less glorious parts, then you can truly get lost in the adventures that Outward gives you.
