Why Outward is the Best Co-op Game Ever Made

I can’t remember what made me buy Outward. I was looking for a survival game, I think, but also an RPG, where your character could grow and develop by making interesting choices. My son and I pretty much only play co-op games too, and so that seriously limits your choice. Outward ticked every box, and there weren’t many others. How many split screen RPGs get made these days? I hadn’t heard of it, and didn’t expect much, but I bought it, because it seemed an inexpensive gamble.

My first experience of it, playing with my son, was nothing short of disastrous. Anyone who has read any of my columns for this site knows that I am not much of a gamer. Any fighters I have to control seem to become arthritic and suffer seizures. If there’s a way my character, instead of beating the enemy by reeling off a seventeen move combo, can set himself on fire and fall off a cliff, then they’ll probably do it. I really managed to do a number on my chances of survival right at the beginning of Outward.

‍
‍Outward is not a forgiving game, and it is not a hand-holding game. There is a bare bones tutorial, teaching you a bit about combat and magic, but after that, it puts you on a beach without a weapon, and with no magic abilities. That confidence you got from the tutorial quickly disappears. You can grab a few berries and a torch, and find your friend Yzan, who tells you you were in a shipwreck, all your stuff is at the bottom of the sea, and to get some rest. When you wake, he has somehow carried you all the way to your hometown of Cierzo. God knows how or why he found the strength to do that, but, um, thanks Yzan. You awaken in a lighthouse, which is your home, come downstairs, and find the whole town is standing outside your door demanding payment. You have nothing. The game, then, begins by demanding you leave town to pay off your debts. If you don’t, you lose your home.

That’s it. It doesn’t tell you how to do it, or where to go. You are on your own. This is not your normal game. We ran around excitedly looking at stuff and finding rubbish bits of loot in bins, filling our limited inventory with wood, and generally doing all the useless stuff people do when they have no idea what they’re doing. The guy at the doors to the city told us to forget going outside (evidently he hadn’t invested in our disastrous voyage, but maybe he had read some of my previous columns for this site). Apparently, we wouldn’t last five minutes out there without a weapon, a backpack and a waterskin. I think we cobbled together a machete and a sword and then I found a storage area, persuaded my son to come with me (when playing with two players, you can only change areas together), and promptly fell off a ledge without reading the sign next to it, which said there’s no way back to Cierzo if you go this way. 

My son had to jump down after me, as there was no way to progress otherwise, and he let me know how unimpressed he was with my adventuring skills so far. We stepped out onto a beach with no food, no water, and with no idea how to get back to the town that now seemed so safe and so far away. Terrifying large shrimps paraded around the beach, and when I tried to sneak by one, it shot me with a bolt of lightning. We ran, wounded and laughing at how hideously hard the game was, or how hideously hard we had just made it.

It got way worse. We got separated, and would pause when in a moment of safety to laugh at the other person’s part of the screen as they ran, terrified, from hyenas and bandits. I saw a bird. I’ll have that, I thought. It’s only a bird. I hit it with my sword. Ha! Take that. Then it jabbed at me like a crazy thing until I died. I lay there for an age until my son found me, and brought me back to life. It turns out you don’t die in Outward (unless you play the hardcore mode), and when one of you is down, the other can raise you by standing over your prone body for long enough (not always easy in a battle). If you both go down, a random scenario plays out, where you wake up saved by a passing traveller, or get taken to a local town by people who took your money as payment, or captured and placed in a dungeon somewhere, or several other options. It’s a really great idea, and when you wake, you are generally completely battered and still near death, just looking for a quiet spot where you can rest and try to recover.

Three wheels in the corner of your screen area show your health, stamina and, when you finally learn magic, mana. Within each wheel you have a light area, which is useable and depletes when you get hit, take a swing, or cast a spell. You also have a dark area, which is “burnt” and no longer useable. If you use up lots of your light area too quickly, some of it will end up “burnt”. Stamina will regenerate over time when you aren’t sprinting or attacking, but the burnt area will not. Health and mana can be replenished by potions, but not if it is burnt. This way, you get to a position where the only thing you can do to restore your wheels to full is to camp, or take one of the few consumables that can restore a small amount of burnt health. The longer you sleep, the more of the burnt areas are restored, but if you are too hungry or thirsty, the game will not allow you to sleep for as long as you need, or you will die.

It’s a brilliant system that takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s also a punishing one. You can limp out of a battle, and it can take some care before you are ready for another. When you finish a battle in many RPGs, you simply heal up. In Divinity, for example, you use the bedroll. Boom. Good as new. In Outward, every blow hurts, and sometimes you need to get your head down for a number of hours to heal up. But if you are running low on food or water (or you fell out of the storage area without a bedroll), you end up with tough choices to make. Outward is all about tough choices, and about learning what works the hard way.

To sum up the rest of our first playthrough, my son ran up a purple mountain, was surprised when a pile of rocks at the top was actually a monster in disguise, and he ran straight off the top of the mountain trying to get away from it, a reaction I think he inherited from me. We still laugh about that one. Once I revived him, we got captured by bandits and woke up in their camp without our stuff. It was dark and we had no health. We ran around aimlessly and would find our stuff, but then we’d be captured again and easily killed, probably while screaming. I’m not sure we ever got away. Instead we uninstalled the game and played something else for a while, saying that was the hardest game of all time.

But we still talked about it sometimes, generally laughing about how badly we had done, and we finally went back. It had gotten under my skin. It took some persuading to get my son to play it again, but when we did, we made sure we got all the right stuff, and then went out of the front gate, with the bloke on the door proudly telling us we would be alright this time. He was wrong. God, how wrong. But we were better than before, and proudly brought back a huge mushroom we stole from some cave-dwelling troglodytes to sell to some weird lady who liked huge mushrooms.

We took smaller trips out and got used to it, and started killing bandits and hyenas, before racing home to heal our wounds. Then we went back to the purple mountain, and learned about magic. And then we found there were three different factions, all with different plans and grievances with each other, and we could choose which to join, and begin to affect the world around us in different ways. And we found out about skill trees and skilled trainers who stand around in the various cities from whom you can buy skills. The best skills require you to buy a breakthrough point, and your character can only buy three of those, so you must choose carefully from the eight trainers available and make sure you have some synergy between your chosen skill trees. And we found better armour, and better weapons, and we actually began to enjoy fighting. Sometimes, I didn’t even scream.

We were hooked, and it began the love affair that has continued to this day. This isn’t a review, as the more critical among you will have already said out loud by now. It’s a love letter. I’ll state it boldly now: Outward is the most fun I’ve ever had with a co-operative video game. My son and I have, and this may surprise you after reading how bad we were (and how bad I still am), completed the game several times now over several hundred hours, and done all of the quest lines, and most of the builds that seem possible, though we definitely have our favourites. My demure and polite son likes becoming the tankiest of tanks and smashing the living hell out of everything that moves with a huge two-handed sword, while I wear the quickest gear, ready for a speedy getaway if things go south, and cowardly shoot any baddies I see with guns, or arrows, or chakrams, from as far away as possible. My last build did finally have a sword that I actually used, rather than wielded to look scary, and I can now even fight things with it without dying, if they’re small and have been critically injured by my son’s alpha warrior. Progress, I tell you. Those birds don’t scare me now. Well, unless it’s the Alpha Pearlbird. That thing’s a maniac.

I don’t know what it is about Outward that’s so great. Actually I do, I just don’t know how to smoothly tell you in a well-written article. So I’ll list some reasons, randomly. Just picture me like when you were at school and your mate was right up in your grill telling you with breathless enthusiasm why this game was so different! 

‍Number one: there is no fast travel. You have to travel everywhere yourself. You don’t even get a horse. We love Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s number two on our list for a reason. It’s brilliant. But when you finish a fight, you bedroll, then you waypoint back to Driftwood (“then don’t come ova! It’s not like you’re buying anyfin!”) and you’re ready to go to the next mission. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it gets you to the next interesting bit of the game. But it’s not immersive. 

In Outward, if you are going somewhere that is a long way away, you have to plan. You have to make sure you have what you might need, as it could be the difference between success and disaster. Food, water, a tent, potions, a flint and steel to light a fire, maybe even a cooking pot if you can spare the room in your rucksack. But make sure your food won’t have rotted away before you need it. If it’s cold out, maybe you wear fur armour instead of your usual set. Is your equipment durability OK, or should you make some repairs, either putting in some hours yourself, or paying a few silver to your local blacksmith?

When you emerge from a victory, laden with loot (but not too much loot - you can’t carry everything you find), you try and work out where the hell you are. You have a map of the area you are in, but no idea of whereabouts on it you actually are. So you have to look for landmarks. You split up a bit, both confident you know where you’re going. One of you gets in trouble, or finds something interesting to explore. You get decisions to make. Maybe you’re running low on health, or food, or both. Or the snow has come and you are beginning to freeze. Do you make a fire and camp? It’s getting dark. But you are so hungry, maybe you should just run through the night and find a town. But you don’t know where you are, and navigation is next to impossible at night. And now your lamp has run out; you should have picked up more oil. You’ve found a tree and you’re making a campfire in the pitch black, but what are those lights coming towards you? It’s the eyes of a predator that has seen you, and now you’ll have to fight it in the dark on the edge of a cliff. This doesn’t look good…

It’s tough choices all the way in Outward, and it is so involved. You scrabble together enough food for a meal, and one of you makes the fire, the other gets out the cooking pot, you share the last bit of water out of a waterskin, and then decide who is less hurt, and will therefore keep guard for longer overnight to avoid an ambush. Then, when light comes, you survey the horizon with fresh hope, and maybe that large building over there is that icon on the map, which puts you due north of your destination, so now you think you know which way to head. But you are still hurt, and your backpack is overfull, so you are slow, and so if there are enemies, you will swallow your pride and try and limp your way around them. The triumph when you finally make your way back from a long journey to sell your loot and work out your next goal is terrific. 

‍Number two: No spam saves. You only save Outward when you leave the game. So you can’t save, fight and lose, and reload your previous point. It makes every battle perilous. There is no way to redo it. If you lose, you will be a mess, somewhere, and may not have the resources to have another go at it.

‍
‍Number three: The ambience is amazing. The graphics can be clunky at times, and they’re certainly not the most polished you will ever see, the main case in point, unfortunately, being the first bit of the game: the character creation screen. It must really put some people off the game before they can even begin to experience what the game has to offer. You have a limited number of walking potatoes that you can be. But what it does have in spades is ambience, and when you play the game, the feel of the different areas you can travel through (a cold mountainous region, a desert, a forest, a swamp, a tundra, and… well, whatever the Antique Plateau is) really comes alive, and certain moments when the sun hits just right, and the (absolutely phenomenal) music swells to a climax, it’s honestly brilliant. The different music for each area inhabits your being, so you learn it and sing along without knowing you’re doing it, as it rises and falls. If you crest a mountain just as the best bit of the tune hits, well, it’s almost spiritual. The areas aren’t actually all that big, but they do a great job of feeling like they are, and you will certainly get lost, a lot, until you begin to work them out.

‍Number four: The crafting system. When it starts, it can feel overwhelming. You are terrified of running out of food and drink and just starving to death. As you get better though, and learn the areas, you realise your limits better, and starvation isn’t really the threat you think it is. Instead it’s a way to make your character more powerful for the bigger fights, and you learn the food and potions that will really make your character tough to beat. That will probably be different for each character if they have different strengths, and so you will be looking out for the ingredients that go into those dishes. There’s a good number of things to make, loads of potions, teas, recipes, and each ingredient can be cooked in a pot or an alchemy kit. You learn these by finding recipes or, if you’re crazy, experimenting, and gradually you feel at home in the world. It’s a brilliant and inventive system that really keeps you interested in what is going on around you, and we often plan an outing for foraging to a certain area, just to stock up on key ingredients. This is one of the key factors that bring the world to life rather than just a variety of pretty backdrops to run through.

‍
‍Number five: The weapons and gear. There are a lot of great builds in Outward, and you can really adapt your playstyle however you want, in many magical ways. Each armour piece — head, body, boots — offers a variety of defences. There’s physical damage which impacts your health bar, and impact resistance (you get knocked over if your impact bar goes under halfway). Armour can offer a flat protection against all attacks, as well as defence, a percentage of each attack, as well as adding to your impact resistance. Magical resistance comes in the form of barrier, a flat approach similar to protection, and then defence for each elemental form: lightning, decay, ethereal, fire, ice. Some even boost your damage for those elements, or increase your carrying capacity, or whatever else. So many options. You can choose from a variety of weapons, both ranged and melee, as well as magic. My favourite sword is called Gep’s Blade, and while it does only moderate damage, it is very fast, and each blow causes an ethereal explosion that hurts the target even if they are successfully blocking, as well as damaging all enemies around them. Each weapon feels so different, it really becomes not just about the stats, but about the feel. You can really personalise your character in a more meaningful way than if you could give their face freckles on the character creation screen.

‍
‍Number six: The imagination. It just feels like a world, with everything thought out, and with real depth to it. The story is a bit confusing, made more so by the fact that there were only ten developers, and they could not do big cutscenes or dialogue, etc. It means there’s reading to do, and the lore is not pushed to the front of the game. If you do try and follow it though, there is a decent story there, though we only really picked up on it over the course of several playthroughs. I deliberately won’t go into details, as I think everyone should find the story out as they play.

‍Number seven: The legacy system. There are four legacy chests in the game, spread over the various regions. When you find one, you can leave a cherished item in it. When you play another game, you can choose a previous character to be your legacy. Then, when playing, opening these same legacy chests will give you the item, and often, it has improved over time to be better and more impressive loot than you could otherwise find in the game. I love this approach. The game is full of ideas like this, and the whole game is filled with love and clever touches that no amount of AAA studios seem able to match.

‍Number eight: The music. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s incredible. Maybe my favourite soundtrack ever. My son and I went for a walk in the woods the other day and ended up finding the Enmerkar Forest track on YouTube and playing it on my phone as we walked through, looking for bandits. I know. Sorry (not sorry).

Of course, the game has its critics. The combat is called clunky. The game is too empty. The graphics are ten years out of date. There’s way too much running. The game’s too hard. Where’s the fast travel? Where is my map marker? Some of these, as the Nine Dots Studio head said in a recent interview, are ignorable as being against what the game is trying to do, and some are critical of where the game doesn’t quite succeed in its intentions. I hear criticism of its combat system, and I don’t understand it. It’s not super complicated, it feels responsive to us. Sure, what we have seen of Outward 2 looks quicker and more responsive, but we have put an embarrassing number of hours into Outward, and I just don’t think we’d have done that if we found the combat clunky, like I hear it mentioned by some. 

There are definitely things Outward could do better. Some are superficial, such as character creation, and maybe more voice acting or cutscenes would improve the feel. The towns could feel more like genuine lived-in towns rather than a bunch of buildings, and I guess maybe the odd bug could be ironed out (though most have), and sure, the graphics could at times be slightly better, but none of these are deal breakers for me in any way. Some I think work in its favour. For instance, I like that there isn’t a fight every hundred yards. I like the navigating and foraging being broken up by spying a monster in the distance - it’s exciting in a way that it wouldn’t be if it happened all the time.  I do think these criticisms are more of a factor if you review the game too early, before you have begun to find your way and work out your character, and I wonder if that accounts for the mediocre score on many gaming websites, compared to a range of perfect 10s from people who did play it for long enough to find its hidden depths. You have to give it time; you have to allow it to get under your skin.

If you consider that this game came from a ten-person studio, and one that famously refuses to use ‘crunch’ in order to develop its games, well, I actually think it’s incredible what they have achieved, and once you have fallen for it, there is no other game that can possibly scratch the same itch. Once you’ve got the bug, the game is with you for life. The news of the forthcoming Outward 2 is so exciting we can barely contain ourselves, and the studio has doubled the team, so it should end up being even more packed and fulfilling. As such, let’s see where the game goes in the next instalment. From what we have heard, and from playing Outward for so long, we utterly trust them to deliver. They also have two other games coming out, which will both arrive before Outward 2. I’m interested to see what they are all about as well. The studio approach, from what we have seen here and in interviews, is a real breath of fresh air.

In the meantime, with no release of Outward 2 imminent, if you want to see what the fuss is about, give Outward Definitive Edition a whirl. It might just change your (gaming) life. But please, pick up a waterskin and camping mat before you go into the storage area and fall off the ledge. And read the signs. Take it from people who learned the hard way.