Outbound

Outbound is an exploration sandbox with some light crafting elements where base building is the main draw. You'll forage for materials out in the wild through traditional avenues like mining ore and chopping wood, but those mechanics are pretty simple and don't require you to take multiple swings. It's all one button. Signal towers for unlocking new crafting recipes are scattered throughout the world along with other points of interest. If you want the next cute shelving upgrade or crafting stations to process new materials, you'll have to hop in your van and keep driving. It's a fairly relaxe

🛠️ If you like other crafting games: I've played a ton of crafting games, and Outbound just isn't worth it if you love grinding for materials and exploring to find them. Your slow movement speed and stamina makes hunting for resources a sluggish chore, and the crafting minigame is bare bones. The system feels like it's there to begrudgingly drive exploration, not complement it. Outbound tightly controls your pace with blueprint unlocks and objectives so it never felt like I could explore freely the way I would in other crafting games. 🏚️ If you're in it for the base building: The mobile base b

It took me 16 hours to beat Outbound during my first playthrough, according to Steam's time-played tracker. My playthrough was by no means exhaustive, with me focusing on progression as opposed to decorating my vehicle with different cosmetics. As such, any materials I found were focused on building the required machines to get new materials to keep progressing through the game, as opposed to decorating my camper van (I'm not a very artsy/craftsy kind of player!). That being said, I did find just under half of the cairn stacks, a third of the hidden gnomes, and all the campfires, so this was b

There are four different areas that you'll have to make your way through in Outbound. Getting to each one is typically 'blocked' by some sort of objective that requires you to find a rare material and then use a machine to refine it into something a little trickier to make. For example, you'll need to repair the electric shutter to make it to the third area, and repair the ferry to make it to the fourth area. As such, you'll need to explore each area thoroughly to find enough of the required materials (and download blueprints from the signal towers) before you can move on to the next. I've lis