It is an adage often repeated by a friend of mine, that in order to qualify as a true adventurer, you must have:
- Run for your life.
- Slept in a ditch.
- Eaten something that was going to eat you.
You will probably end up doing all of these things within the first hour’s play of Deep Silver’s forthcoming survival RPG, Outward.
So Deep Silver have served up some real winners in the past seventeen years or so. Look through their back catalogue and you will guarantee find at least a few games that you like, perhaps even love. Outward, it seems, has the potential to join that list.
What’s the setup? Are you the chosen one? Are you the Dragonborn, the one who will save Zelda, the one who can wield the Mana Sword?
No. You’re just a person whose familial line has a significant blood debt, a debt that you are behind on paying, and you need to get enough silver together to fend off the bailiffs.
Well, you probably aren’t going to earn it loitering around town, fishing for a living. So you strap on your backpack, check your bearings on your map, grab a weapon, and march out into the world beyond the walls. Oh boy, that world sure seems… pretty big.
An interesting world it is, too. It isn’t your standard “Medieval Europe But With Dragons And Elves” bollocks that you see so often. The other thing, which I kind of love even if it has gotten me killed multiple times, is that while you have access to a map – that map doesn’t magically auto-update with your location on it. You have a compass built into your UI, but you’re going to have to navigate yourself. That’s it. Actual navigation. Take your bearings on the things around you, relate it to the map, orient yourself and off you go.
That should give you some idea as to the kind of game this is. Further hints should come wherein you have to find a backpack in order to carry much more than what you can fit in your hands – and wearing the backpack slows you down, so you have the option to ditch it before you get into a fight or do anything risky. You need to eat and drink, and eating raw food or dirty water has a chance of making you sick. Magic is far more ritualistic than it is just tossing fireballs, and you aren’t guaranteed to get access to it.
And that is before you even get into a fight.
Combat in Outward is not meant to be easy. Getting hit hurts. Just throwing yourself in without a plan or any preparation is a really easy way to get killed. The potential rewards are significant – but losing all your health has a huge cost. I’ll let you find that out for yourself. (See what happens the first time you drop in the Emmenkar Forest.)
But as you haul yourself up off the deck after having your ass handed to you by Bandits for the second (or third or fourth) time, you will find yourself thinking: okay, I know what I did wrong. I’ll go back to town and I’ll get myself together. I’ll come back at it. I know better, this time.
It’s what keeps people coming back to Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls – it’s what made me put hours into Ikaruga and FTL. And to a slightly lesser, slightly more interesting narrative degree, that is what Outward does. It presses all those buttons, in a very pleasing fashion.
Get in on it. It comes out on 26th March on Windows, PS4 and Xbox One, and you’ll want to be one of the folks that knows their way around slapping down a Pistol Shrimp before your mates cotton on.