My experience with Outward essentially unfolded in two distinct acts. In the first, I spent the majority of my time in this open-world fantasy RPG getting killed by nearly every enemy I encountered, running between the only two cities I knew the way to (after getting locked out of a third) to find gear and salvage crafting materials and baubles so I could sell them. I was also contending with bugs and design failures that first caused my co-op partners to abandon me and, at their apex, left me broke, nude, and alone in a snowbank, dying of exposure. Determined to not let Outward beat me, I used the debug menu to break the obnoxious autosave feature to retrieve my stolen gear and money (a last resort when reviewing a game) and set out on the second act, eventually upgrading enough to grind through the aggravating combat and complete the story. It still wasn’t much fun, but after I’d gotten my hands on the kind of material wealth that turned the tide for me, I got a clearer idea of what Outward is supposed to be.

Outward’s fairly large and interesting world is populated with a pretty even mix of tough-but-fair challenges and buggy, wacky ones. After a total of 60 hours with it, I finished the central quest line I was on, being alternatingly aided and thwarted by bugs and instability along the way. Eventually, I came to respect many of its challenges and saw some of the charm that lurks beneath the surface, but I wish those moments weren’t surrounded by a wasteland of drudgery.

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“ Sprawling landscapes of forests, parched deserts, and demon-infested marshes are by far Outward’s strongest feature.

The combat started out poor and barely improved once I’d learned the ropes and become respectable at it. While you’d expect to start out underpowered in a game about a random peasant who strikes out into the world to pick between one of three factions and do things for them (Outward’s story is pretty thin), the early hours feel poorly balanced relative to most RPGs, creating an inverted difficulty curve where the beginning is significantly more difficult than the end. My experience was essentially a long montage of deaths and cheesy wins. Countless times I’d get disposed of by some scourge beast or bandit because it did inordinate amounts of damage, its hitboxes made absolutely no sense (causing me to take attacks that seemed like they shouldn’t hit), and because it sniffed out any attempts to sneak past it. Adding insult to injury, Outward’s stingy stamina meter depletes to empty with any sustained offense longer than a few seconds and takes half a minute – if not an in-game night’s sleep – to fully recover, forcing you to ration swings of your weapons in long fights. These disadvantages remain in effect as you advance, but naturally, earning better armor, weapons, skills, traps, and magic mitigate them considerably. Getting enough silver to put good armor on my avatar, finally getting a top-shelf weapon after a long and arduous side quest, and learning some useful skills, both passive (thank you, extra stamina!) and active (thank you, rune magic!) finally let me stand toe-to-toe with some of the hostiles without feeling like I needed to exploit the AI, such as backpedaling while a foe cycled through their entire moveset before they left the one opening I could safely hit.

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Unfortunately, this doesn't fix the actual fighting. It's still floaty and imprecise, with long delays between pressing attack and getting one off that make timing difficult and dodging an inconsistent method of avoiding damage, and the stamina meter is still a pain throughout. In order to keep myself alive against some of Outward's fiercest enemies I had to adopt a fighting style so defensive that I was doing virtually nothing. The toughest boss I fought felt like he took forever to kill because, halfway through his health meter, I only had the stamina and time to hit him once before resuming my defensive tactics to wait for another opportunity. In too many confrontations the tension evaporated after my mana was spent and my stamina started to trickle. Circle, block, hit, repeat. Yawn. More skills, more responsive combat, and more fragile enemies would have gone a long way here: In my book, high-lethality enemies are only a flaw when a combat system is so one-sided as to destroy pace, and that’s what happened here.

A Little Help From My Friends One of Outward’s biggest features is the ability to play alongside a friend, remotely or locally in split-screen (even on PC!). With a simple password, a buddy can easily drop into your world and help you with its challenges. Practically, this is considerably helpful – an extra sword arm and scavenger makes combat, especially in the early going, orders of magnitude easier (though not necessarily more exciting). Tag-teaming enemies is easier than fighting alone, even with them being more powerful than they are when playing solo, and Outward feels like it’s more appropriately balanced with two people, but co-op combat usually just consisted of forming a pincer and whacking away while the baddie confuses itself over who to attack. Most importantly, the companionship, laughs, and groans of our shared failures and exploits added considerably to my experience. I had the most fun with Outward in co-op, but that doesn’t make it a good game. After all, you can laugh at a bad movie with friends and have a good time, but that doesn’t mean you’re watching a good movie.





“ Complex spell-casting that rewards practice and preparation like this is something more RPGs should try.

The ever-present survival mechanics in Outward aren’t so impressive, though. While having to eat and drink to stay alive adds a lot to some games, like The Long Dark, here the decisions are so routine and basic that they cast the grimy pall of a grind across the whole thing. You spend maybe up to three quarters of your time walking from place to place, and all the while you’re getting hungry, thirsty, and injured. You can resolve the first two with a button, and that's all there is to it. Managing thirst is never any more complicated than taking a drink from the waterskin, and when you run out, finding fresh water to boil or topping up at a city. The only thirst related tension I ever experienced came from a bug causing my backpack to vanish or forgetting to boil river water. Ordinarily it’s too forgiving to be meaningful – when a couple full waterskins gives you enough hydration to trek from one end of the world to another, the mechanic becomes superfluous.

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Eating better food affords some sparse bonuses, and learning crafting recipes to cook some nicer dishes pays off, but I always had more important things to spend my money on than food so I was limited to what I could scavenge. Increased health regeneration following a good meal was nice, but never as an impediment to saving up enough for a new skill or a better sword.

Food isn’t the only thing you can create, and the rest of the crafting felt more immediately relevant and satisfying. Crafting potions, weapons, traps, and armor led to dramatic power swings, potent healing and mana restoration, easier fights, and some other interesting effects. That, at least, made it worth keeping a pile of ingredients around, though when it was time to make room for heavier salvage that I could sell, crafting materials and food ingredients were usually the first thing that I jettisoned.

“ I grapple enough with wasting a third of my life in a bed in my day to day; I don't need it from an RPG.

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I wanted less meandering, janky fights with random bandits and ostrich-Chocobo things and more epic duels with powerful wizards and alpha monsters. I wanted more hills to crest and mysteries to chase down, more mysterious spires looming in the distance that I could reach and plumb, more time spent finding rewards off the beaten path and less running the length of entire regions to get to the same four cities to get a paragraph of dialogue giving me something new to do. I wanted more potions and poisons tipping the scales in battle and less scavenging for berries or water to fulfill tedious, needy thirst and hunger icons. Some may embrace the grind, but I simply didn’t find that any of that stuff fun.