Jumping in the back of a camper van and taking to the open road is the premise behind Outbound, a new and extremely mellow survival indie game from Square Glade Games. It takes a lot of finesse to make a game without narrative or structured goals. Minecraft managed it, although you could argue that its day/night cycle at least meant you had to build defensively and against a repeated time limit. No Man's Sky did too, although that had a trail of cryptic clues to follow, if you wanted to. It's perhaps Animal Crossing that comes closest to complete abandonment of video games' usual focus on scoring and story, if you're not bothered about paying Tom Nook back anytime soon. To see what happens when a developer of less than Nintendo's calibre takes on a similar project, look no further than Tales Of The Shire, a Hobbit life simulator so dreary you'd gladly have welcomed an army of Uruk-hai just to relieve the monotony. It's a brave or foolhardy studio that takes on such a task, and that's just what Square Glade Games have done.
Gameplay and Mechanics
In Outbound you take the wheel of a camper van, heading off on a road trip through the wilderness, or at least the parts of it directly accessible by vehicle and a short walk. Leaving the city in your rear view mirror, you take to its simply drawn countryside with a soundtrack of birdsong and the hum of your electrically-powered motorhome. There's a blank map to fill in and no particular agenda. To fuel your exploits you'll need to do plenty of foraging and crafting, and the first requirement of that process is blueprints, which you acquire by visiting signal towers found scattered more or less evenly around the map. To access them, you'll need a ticket that you can only get by recycling the litter you find in lay-bys and campsites, and to acquire that you'll need to construct a recycler and a wooden cabinet to stand it on in the back of your van. Thus begins a familiar web of dependencies, which begins with making tools, then using those to gather crafting resources. An axe lets you turn fallen trees into usable timber, a pick smashes boulders into rocks, while a sickle lets you harvest grain and extract fibre from larger bushes. Soon enough you'll come across tougher logs, stones, and shrubbery, each of which demands an upgraded version of your starter tools.
Survival and Upkeep
You'll also need to take care of survival. As you walk, drive, and craft, your character's fullness level declines, and once depleted your health bar drops in slow chunks until you faint, waking up back in your van. To prevent that you'll need sustenance. To start with, that means harvesting and eating berries from bushes, but you'll soon craft a food processor and learn recipes that ease the initial pressure of subsistence. The same goes for your electric camper van, whose biomass generator runs on logs and plant fibre. Before long you get hold of more efficient means of generating that energy and find charging stations that give you a full battery whenever you like, asking nothing in return. However, to explore more of the map your motor will need a few upgrades that let it take on steeper hills and carry more kit for crafting. You'll need new pieces of machinery to manufacture the parts needed to research those upgrades, and then to build them, and so it goes on, your gradual exploration accompanied by a concurrent crafting and upgrade path, stopping along the way to visit landmarks you've seen and tracked from a distance, and to solve straightforward puzzles, often leading to more blueprints.
Overall Experience
It's undoubtedly a mellow process. There's no combat, and the roads and countryside are populated only by the odd rabbit, with fellow motorists entirely missing. It's just you and the open road, and as day turns to night you'll need to prop open the side of your van, maybe cook a meal if you're hungry, and go to bed, waking up the next morning refreshed and with some of your health bar replenished by a night's sleep. Outbound's gameplay loop is solid enough but stops well short of being compelling. Without anything to drive your exploration or any sense of progression, beyond filling in the map and beefing up your camper van, it's not long before progress starts to feel oddly pointless. You do get a dog to accompany you on your meanderings, and there is online co-op if you can talk others into joining you, but neither feature makes you eager for yet more of the same. With no risk or pressure, no overarching aim, and nothing beyond idle curiosity propelling you forward, the experience becomes lacklustre, and eventually dull. It's certainly courageous leaving out so much of what makes up a traditional game, but sadly in Outbound's case it's an audacious move that doesn't quite pay off.
Outbound Review Summary
In Short: A competent camping and survival game set in an unpopulated wilderness, whose lack of narrative structure, threat, or competitive elements leaves it feeling disappointingly hollow.
Pros: Crafting and upgrade paths are well implemented. The simply rendered landscapes make for a pleasing environment to trundle around in, and exploration is initially fun.
Cons: Survival can feel like a chore in the opening hours. Driving speed is frustratingly close to walking pace and the absence of goals or story rapidly saps your interest.
Score: 5/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Silver Lining
Developer: Square Glade Games
Release Date: 14th May 2026
Age Rating: 3
