Outbound review for PC, Nintendo, PS5, Xbox Series X

Survival games and the cozy genre seem like they wouldn’t be a great combination. After all, the very term “survival” implies death if you fail, whereas cozy games are generally about trying to keep things happy and light.

So it was that I went into Outbound a little skeptical and unsure of what to expect. It’s a survival crafting game, but it’s very clearly also meant to be cozy and wholesome – you’ve got a campervan, and you can basically mod it until it turns into a giant portable house on wheels. On top of that, the game quickly opens up multiplayer mode after teaching you the basics, so it’s encouraging you to think of it as a sunny roadtrip where you grab a few friends and head out for adventure.

The problem is that there’s not a whole lot of adventure to be found here. There’s no plot, no story, no conflict – just you and the open road. While I get that sometimes people like just aimlessly driving around without any purpose, as a game it’s not quite so compelling.

Instead, you just have tasks – you light fires, you gather materials, you build, you have checklists of stuff to do. And your reward for doing those checklists? More checklists, obviously, because there’s no story to speak of to push things forward.

In fact, mere survival isn’t even enough to act as a stand-in for a plot in Outbound, because, again, this is a cozy game, so there’s no way to die. You have a health bar, sure, and you occasionally need to sleep – but if you don’t, it’s no biggie, you just kind of pass out and the game sets you back at your camp, no harm done and nothing really lost..

In the game’s defence, of course, I’m kind of missing its whole point. It’s not meant to have a story, and it’s not meant to be about surviving. Rather, as noted up top, Outbound is meant to be about having a chill experience without any worries or threats. It just wants you to relax in a brightly coloured world, enjoy the vibes, and complete those checklists. Or not, because if you don’t, nothing bad is going to happen anyway.

By that metric, I guess you could call Outbound a success, but that seems like such a low bar that it hardly seems like an achievement. I don’t want to underestimate the need some people may have to simulate a road trip without having to actually having to go on one – and the act of “going outside and doing stuff” that may entail – but there’s so little here, it’s hard not to wonder what the point of it all is.

Square Glade Games provided us with an Outbound PC code for review purposes.