Outward is an RPG built around combat, exploration, travel, and the grind to stay alive within the rules of its survival mechanics. Sprawling landscapes of forests, parched deserts, and demon-infested marshes are by far Outward's strongest feature. Eventually, I came to respect many of its challenges and saw some of the charm that lurks beneath the surface, but I wish those moments weren’t surrounded by a wasteland of drudgery. After a total of 60 hours with it, I finished the central quest line I was on, being alternatingly aided and thwarted by bugs and instability along the way. Outward’s fairly large and interesting world is populated with a pretty even mix of tough-but-fair challenges and buggy, wacky ones. It still wasn’t much fun, but after I’d gotten my hands on the kind of material wealth that turned the tide for me, I got a clearer idea of what Outward is supposed to be. Determined to not let Outward beat me, I used the debug menu to break the obnoxious autosave feature to retrieve my stolen gear and money (a last resort when reviewing a game) and set out on the second act, eventually upgrading enough to grind through the aggravating combat and complete the story. I was also contending with bugs and design failures that first caused my co-op partners to abandon me and, at their apex, left me broke, nude, and alone in a snowbank, dying of exposure. In the first, I spent the majority of my time in this open-world fantasy RPG getting killed by nearly every enemy I encountered, running between the only two cities I knew the way to (after getting locked out of a third) to find gear and salvage crafting materials and baubles so I could sell them. My experience with Outward essentially unfolded in two distinct acts.
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