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.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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