Reviews
[Review] ‘Outward’ is a Rough and Overwhelming Survival RPG, But Can Be a Rewarding Experience
We’re going on an adventure! Find out why it’s a long, tough road to enjoyment in Bloody Disgusting’s Outward review for PC.
You’ll have to enjoy certain kinds of games to really get the best out of Outward. A swift glance at it in action may suggest a low-rent ‘Dark Souls clone’, but in all honesty, it’s much deeper and far more intimidating than that.
Outward is indeed an action RPG with more than a nod toward’s From Software’s series. It even features an eerily similar quick menu on the HUD. This and the combat is about it, however. The game is more open world and the monsters are far from your only obstacle.
You begin the story washed ashore in what turns out to be your homeland, and after staggering to a nearby camp and passing out with exhaustion, you soon discover that you’re not exactly in for a heroes welcome.
Safely back at your home, you find you’re in a blood debt that needs paying in a matter of days. With little in the way of options in town to make money, you must head outside the gates and try to earn the coin out in the dangerous wilds, and boy is it dangerous. That’s just the start of the story though, and your journey will take you, an ordinary citizen with high vulnerability, to some frighteningly tough places (though you’re able to tackle it with a friend in local or online co-op if you want).
Outward is structured closer to a regular RPG, with hub areas, NPC’s handing out quests, and a grind to progress. The grind is not so much about stats as it is in the game’s key component, survival. Truly the survival in Outward is where the game currently shines brightest, and also where it may lose some people.
This is a fantasy world, filled with beasts and magic, yet it holds a refreshing degree of realism due to its unrelenting survival core. You can end up afflicted by any number of diseases, illnesses or injuries, and not just from enemy attack, but from poor diet, incorrect clothing choices, and well… doing stupid reckless shit. In fact, not paying enough attention got me into plenty of interesting situations where small emergent stories crop up (I ended up imprisoned more than once for messing with the wrong people). Death doesn’t really come, rather you pass out and end up somewhere else. Sometimes you get rescued, sometimes you barely crawl away from your experience, but whatever happens, it tends to be interesting, if occasionally frustrating depending on where I’ve ended up in relation to what I’d been doing. The lesson here is to plan and be sensible.
With such a big world to explore, the urge is there to dash about finding new areas, but in Outward, that’s almost certain doom. Outward is all about planning, and improvisation when the planning fails. You can do temporary fixes on the fly, maybe tear up a shirt to make bandages for instance, but you really have to come prepared and to do that, you’ll need to keep plenty of stuff handy.
You can only carry a finite amount of items on your person though, and when you need weapons, water, food, camping equipment and more, that’s a daunting prospect. Here enter the backpacks, the beautifu damn backpacks. You can store additional items in a bag that you carry around with you. They start small, raggedy and humble, but you can find bigger, better ones around the place. The trade-off for more and more space is that you have less and less mobility.
That makes combat trickier, especially when taking on more agile predatory animals. Smartly, this means you need to plan out where you’re going to go, how far it is, and what’s essential for the trip. If you’re crossing multiple types of terrain, for example, you need plenty of clothing, prepared foods, and item variation if you’re going to survive dehydration, freezing, etc, etc. It gives the simple act of walking a vicious edge.
Handily, you are able to dump your backpack at a moments notice. A good strategy if a fight is hard and requires only basic inventory, or if a quick escape is an optimum solution for the time being. You can come back and retrieve it once the situation has deescalated, but naturally, it’s another set of risks to just leave hard earned cash and saleable items out there unattended.
The combat itself is quite wonky. It’s a little too loose, and lacks the heft needed to really feel like its a part of the game’s realistic mechanics. What it does do right is making each battle, big or small, feel like it matters. You always stand to gain something from each fight or escape, whether that be valuable items (in Outward, even the smallest item finds feel like an accomplishment) or simply knowledge and strategy for future battles.
There’s also the issue of handling multiple enemies. While it’s sensible to expect a tough fight against several opponents, especially when you’re underpowered, the targeting currently falls short of the responsiveness required when a fight is unavoidable (which it can often be). The controls are decent overall, but there really does need to be some serious refinement.
It’s a shame because Outward really does throw some impressive beasts at you as you wander the various biomes. The design of them alone is surprisingly varied given the scale of the world itself, though they could do with a touch more variety in terms of combat patterns.
Visually speaking, Outward is a very mixed bag. On PC with settings cranked up, it’s still somewhat rough around the edges, and while the world design can be decent in parts, there’s a lot of blandness to the parts in between. Faces are somehow more melty and distorted to look at than those found in something like Oblivion. I also tested the PS4 version and it is undeniably very rough-looking on there, even on the Pro.
Learning to manage the game’s many systems is the biggest potential stumbling block players will face. If you’re the sort to revel in micromanagement and extreme challenge and enjoy the thrill of actually exploring and living in a place rather than wandering from objective to objective, then Outward could be something special for you from the get-go. It’s a hard sell otherwise, with such overwhelming depth, occasionally misfiring combat, and rather grimy visuals.
Then again, perhaps that might be the best way to deliver the purest form of Outward, a flawed, aggressive beast that requires time and patience. It would possibly lose something in being too refined. It makes adventuring into something different and intriguing, after all.
Outward review code provided on PC by the publisher.
Outward is out now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Books
‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ Book Review: Paul Tremblay’s Primal Scream Against the AI Push
Read enough Paul Tremblay novels and one word comes to dominate your thinking around his fiction: “Daring.”
Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all, Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI.
Julia, Tremblay’s protagonist, is in a strange place when the novel begins. A former gaming streamer who’s retreated from her digital spotlight, she’s in search of a new direction in life, and she finds one in the last place she might expect. Julia’s mother, who runs a California tech behemoth, has a job offer for her daughter, an unprecedented one. It seems that the company has introduced proprietary new technology into the body of a brain-dead man, and now they need to see what this tech can do. Julia’s job? Using her gaming skills to take this human vegetable (Julia calls him “Bernie” because of Weekend at Bernie’s) from one side of the country to another, using a stealthy controller purpose-built for the experience.
This is a wonderfully ghoulish premise on which to build a novel, and Tremblay makes full use of its nightmare fuel. As Julia comes to grips with the implications of what she’s about to do, and what she might discover while doing it, the author punctuates her journey with trips into the mad mindscape of Bernie himself, a dark reflection of our own world populated with half-remembered moments and images and hallucinations. As simple exercises in writing craft, they recall Philip K. Dick at his best, building the same sense of overwhelm and wonder so present in his work, but Tremblay’s after something else as well, and it’s purpose-built for this moment.
The novel builds deliberate juxtapositions with Bernie’s half-remembered life and Julia’s ongoing one, sending them barreling at each other from opposite ends of consciousness. Julia’s brain functions as only her brain can, a mass of pop culture references and dreams and memories she both cherishes and would rather forget. Bernie’s world is one of shadows, but also one of constantly shifting perspective, as the tech in his head remakes him. He’s not just a passenger in his own body, but an unwilling participant in a Frankenstein-ing of human and machine. It’s not the first time an author has attempted such a thing, but through Tremblay’s evocative, visceral prose, it’s one of the most effective, and it hits on something vital that Tremblay says in a way that only he can.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a thumping sci-fi yarn, a journey into new frontiers through untested technology with vast implications for the future of the world, and if Tremblay had only explored that genre, he’d have done well. When the horror elements creep in, though, Tremblay’s work raises endless questions over what exactly we are sacrificing when we let machines get so close not just to our flesh, but to our consciousness, even when, medically speaking, that consciousness is gone.
Tremblay breaks this sacrifice down in terrifying detail, sometimes quite literally breaking down the basic flow of prose in Bernie’s head until he’s been hijacked by words and phrases and shapes that he doesn’t understand. Along the way, Tremblay gets almost metafictional with his probing of this hybrid consciousness, asking us to question not just where the story will go, but who gets to be in control when the narrative becomes a runaway train.
All of this makes Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep the most ambitious book of Paul Tremblay’s career, which is really saying something. His daring, his boldness, and his ability to mine the unspeakable are on full display, and they work together to deliver one of the year’s most unnerving genre books.
Tremblay’s at the peak of his powers with this one.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep hits shelves on June 30.
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