Outbound

I came at Outbound from the wrong angle. My instinct was to treat it like a progression-heavy survival builder and optimize every watt of solar output from day one. The game politely ignores that impulse. What Square Glade has built is closer to an interactive road-trip mood board than a systems-driven sim, and once I recalibrated my expectations, the first several hours genuinely delivered. The central hook is clever and underused by the genre: rather than planting a base on a plot of dirt, your entire operation rides on four wheels. The camper van is your crafting bench, power grid, sleeping quarters, and storage combined, and you haul it across four distinct biomes, each gated by progression. You pick a starting vehicle from three options (a fourth school-bus variant is sold separately as DLC), and from there the van expands upward and outward using a modular building system. Solar panels, wind turbines, and water-based generators each feed your power budget differently depending on terrain and time of day, which gives energy management a small but satisfying puzzle quality early on. Blueprint towers scattered across each zone unlock new crafting recipes when you bring them the right resources, and that drip-feed of new workstation options, from a sewing machine for gear upgrades to a rain catcher assembly, keeps the upgrade loop ticking for a while. The van can eventually sprout a full multi-storey structure from its roof, and that visual payoff of watching a bare chassis become a rolling home is the game's most consistently rewarding moment. Where Outbound runs out of road is in the space between those moments. The resource-gathering routine is pleasant for the first few hours then becomes mechanical repetition: stop, get out, collect wood and fibre from roadside scatter, get back in, drive 40 metres, repeat. No combat, no threatening wildlife, no NPCs to find at the next campsite. The world is gorgeous, all soft painterly lighting and curated tree placement, but it is strikingly empty. The main objectives beyond van upgrades are collectathon tasks, stacking cairns, hunting gnomes, restoring landmarks, which work as light direction but thin out quickly as a substitute for narrative. The night cycle enforces a bedtime mechanic that disables sprinting unless you have found specific boots, which reads less as intentional tension and more as pacing friction. Solo play in particular starts to feel isolating in a way the game does not seem to intend. Co-op with up to four players, which supports cross-play, is clearly where the experience breathes: splitting resource runs, collaborative van decoration, and just cruising with someone in the passenger seat transforms what is otherwise a quiet solo loop into something genuinely pleasant. Progression in co-op keeps individual blueprint unlocks tied to each player, so nobody is blocked by a friend who is further along. There is also launch context worth knowing. Square Glade drew community criticism early on for responding to negative Steam reviews by asking players to remove them, then apologized publicly. The current Steam position of mostly positive at 73 percent reflects that messy start settling down. A published roadmap promises ongoing patches and a fishing update later in 2026, which suggests the team is treating this as a live project rather than a finished one. For players who can tolerate a game that is not quite fully baked at v1.0, the bones are solid. For anyone who needs a reason to log back in beyond personal decorating goals, Outbound currently asks you to supply that motivation yourself.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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