Outbound Review - Base Building That Comes With You
Outbound promises the freedom of the open road: just you, your van, and an unexplored map full of exciting new discoveries. The game explains its core loop in the first few minutes: you find a campsite, light a fire, collect some resources, download a crafting blueprint, build some tools, and continue your travels.
On paper, these sorts of activities align perfectly with my taste in video games: I love exploring, gathering, and base-building. But for some reason, the loop of Outbound just didn’t quite click for me. I’ve been trying to work out why.
In Outbound, your van is your base. You bring it with you wherever you go, setting up camp when you find an exciting, unexplored area so you can jump out and run around. Being able to bring your base with you to each area sounds freeing on paper, but part of the reason I love exploring is not just because of the adventure, but also the return home.
In most base-building games, your base becomes that home. It’s not just about the structure you build, but also the environment you build it into. You learn which paths to take, the shape of the landmarks, and how the space looks at different times of day. In Outbound, you become familiar with the landscape to some extent—you have to return to key areas multiple times so you can tap into new radio signals or return to the Cap ‘N Snap gachapon machine—but you don’t form that same permanent relationship with the space.
This feels intentional. Outbound foregrounds its environmental themes, with your rechargeable electric vehicle, the ability to turn litter into useful resources, and the wind turbines on the horizon. But this low-impact interaction with the environment comes at the cost of spatial connection. By resisting the extractive settlement fantasies common in survival crafting games—even of the cosy variety—players are forced to pass through the world responsibility without reshaping it.
Don’t get me wrong: I think embedding environmental sustainability in a game’s mechanics is a noble endeavour. It’s clear that Square Glade Games cares deeply about this game and the world they have created. They are already responding to player feedback, making minor tweaks to systems and publicly sharing their roadmap with their community.
But the attempt to explore sustainability also introduces friction that Outbound doesn’t quite resolve for me at the moment. I love collecting loot, but every time I noticed a log or berry bush to collect, I had to weigh its value against the interruption of stopping my vehicle, jumping out, wandering over, collecting the resources, and getting back in the driver’s seat.
Outbound features multiplayer co-op, and this can help. This friction is reduced when one player can drive while the other gathers resources. But, more than that, playing with a companion can create the sense of continuity that I didn’t feel from the game world. Another player becomes a witness that you are present in the world and impacting it in some way, even when the environment itself doesn’t appear to have changed.
I feel like I should be Outbound‘s ideal audience, based on my interests and usual gaming habits. But in reality, I just couldn’t get into a flow state with this game. My curiosity waned, and my usual routines felt interrupted, despite the awesome building mechanics that let you construct a whole house on top of your van.
I think I respect Outbound‘s approach to survival crafting games more than I enjoy it. Its exploration of environmental sustainability and stewardship is reflected structurally, not just aesthetically, and that creates a sense of alignment. But it also manages to weaken the sense of place and attachment that I’ve learned make this genre compelling to me.
Perhaps I should just park my van somewhere and start exploring this beautiful landscape on foot.
Outbound was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
