izigame.me

Man, fuck this game. Fuck this beautiful, intriguing, addicting gem of a game.
I'll preface this by saying that I bought this game at launch, and it managed to get refunded in a record time of under an hour, due to the dubious honor of beating fallout 1 at worst onboarding experience I've seen in a videogame by not only providing a timed quest right off the gate, which in combination with its novel and blood pressure-rising death mechanics, makes it so there's a SIXTY PERCENT dropout in player achievements from the second they leave the initial town. The fact that the game looks like a slightly nicer Mount & Blade or Sea Dogs (plasticky characters, super stiff and clunky animations, detailed yet uncanny textures draped over otherwise simple geometry) probably doesn't help, particularly considering that this is a $40 game off discount, but if people are willing to pay 30 for Rimworld, it can always be argued that this is more of a personal taste.
So, what's so special about dying in Outward? Well, the first element to this punch-through-your-TV winning formula is that there is only one save file, and it's updated constantly and automatically. The second is that, unlike you, enemies don't have stamina, and while their AI is incredibly straightforward and easy to cheese, they will spam the everloving shit out of their attacks, over, and over, and over again, and in the majority of cases you won't be able to escape either, because they will chase you relentlessly until, if you're lucky you reach an area transition, or most of the time, you run out of breath and get appropriately styled on. This will trigger one of a few "defeat scenarios" where you will usually wake up on some dungeon, or if the game takes pity on you, rescued by some good samaritan. Either way, you will lose from a few hours to a few ingame days in the process, and remember how THE VERY FIRST QUEST YOU ARE GIVEN IS TIMED?
Not only that, but most of the defeat scenarios will wake you up with just a portion of your health and stamina, sometimes naked, within aggro range of enemies that will immediately beeline it to you before you manage to make sense of where you are, which means you can (and probably will) get ragdolled between 4-5 "defeat scenarios" until you wake up somewhere hospitable. Your character can't really die (unless playing "hardcore" mode) but most of the main quests are timed and missable/failable, although once you get the ball rolling in terms of equipment and knowledge, it's not so bad. Get ready to restart a few characters until you get the hang of that first mission, though, but do so knowing that once that first hairy monkey ass sucking first quest is done, the game will open up to one of the most strangely enticing ideas you're likely to play.
Once you have re-secured your home, and provided you don't immediately start one of the questlines, you will then be free to explore the 6 regions (DLC included) as you see fit. Outward is an entirely level-less game, and while certain enemies will hit harder than others, you will be free to run around, loot chests, find dungeons, and getting skullfucked by mobs as you see fit. Here's where we find the other signature feature of Outward, camping, survival and inventory management.
Carry capacity in Outward is dictated by the size of your bag, which in time determines your roll speed. And while you are able to take out your backpack at any time, you better make sure you put at least some essentials in your pockets, because otherwise you run a very real risk of reaching out for antivenom in the middle of combat, only to realize you left all of it in your pack, lying on the ground way too far for you to save yourself. Fights in this game are usually won or lost before they start: if you are able to set up a fight in advance with buffs, imbues, traps, spell synergies and nutrition you will be in an infinitely easier position than if an enemy jumps you. The problem is that even a baseline setup with a couple stacks of ammo, a few potions and some food will already take up to 50 to 70 pounds, and your standard pack will carry between 50 and 75 pounds, so you better get a home in each city and leave everything you don't need-- wait, what's that? Oh yeah silly me, YOU ONLY HAVE ONE HOUSE, BACK IN THE INITIAL AREA. AND THAT'S IT.
Okay, that's not accurate, you get the chance to buy one house when starting one of the questlines, but barring that, it's you and your pack and whatever hobo camps you set up in cities (which will reset periodically but this can be disabled via mods), and considering that traveling between cities must be done on foot and takes a sizeable amount of ingame days (yay for timed quests!), you're going to be uncomfortably juggling backpacks every time you go back to a town. Outward stands at odds with itself between wanting you to stock up and prepare, but also being super punishing with its carry capacity. There's a selection of tents and crafting stations you can lug around, and while maps are large you'll always be within reasonable distance of a city, making camping out in the road absolutely pointless, but also at least not making you lug around 20 extra pounds of gear everywhere you go, so there's that I guess. The "survival" elements are borderline pointless, and it's more about always having an active health and stamina regeneration buff than staying alive.
On the topic of inventory management, you are given 8 quickslots to share between items and active skills. and considering you can commit to 3 (out of 11) skill trees each providing anywhere from 3 to 6 actives, it means that you are going to need to prioritize your loadouts a lot. Even by using a mod to get twice the slots, you are going to agonize about what goes where and what spells are left out of rotation. I get that the developers wanted to limit the players, but the truth is, while a lot of skills don't *really* need to be on a quick slot and can be activated from the status screen, having to navigate your inventory to have to activate skills, or finding your trap triggers on an ocean of items is tedious and clunky, moreso when you're fumbling around for a bandage while bleeding to death. Like a lot of its systems, Outward's item management is well-intentioned, but annoying and clumsily executed.
Progression, too, is also strangely lopsided, having come across blueprints in the second "canon" town for weapons that easily jump 2 tiers compared to the rest. And even having explored for over 60 hours before committing to a questline and maxing out 3 skill trees, I'll still get my shit pushed in by quests closing me in a room with a group of 3 enemies plus an elite who will just teabag you without mercy, attacking you from all sides and getting cheap hits in thanks to your stilted, long ass animations. The game feels borderline AI generated as to what is placed where, or even missions that will literally make you visit the same building twice for two separate missions from separate factions one after the other; but no, it's just Outward being Outward.
This game feels like a great core that either was unable to reach its full potential, or incompetently directed, its systems at odds with each other and relying on cheap limitations to waste the player's time and patience. But precisely because of that, when you finally get out of your 5 consecutive death spiral and return to where you got killed to John Wick every single bandit in that camp it feels great. Or managing to run through a dungeon through planning, care and/or just industrial amounts of cheese.
I'm not going to lie, I don't think this is a very good game, but I wouldn't have spent 60+ hours on this leading cause of aneurysm if I hadn't gotten any enjoyment out of it. I don't even think you should buy it at 40 bucks, but limited, janky, cheap, tedious and annoying as it is, you might be caught into it as much as I regret to be.
6/10.