Outward is an open-world fantasy role-playing game built around survival, and it is the rare RPG that treats hunger, thirst, warmth and fatigue as more than a check box. Nine Dots Studio developed it, and Koch Media and Deep Silver published it. It launched for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One in March 2019, hit Google Stadia in November 2020, and arrived on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S alongside the Definitive Edition in May 2022.
Trailer, via Deep Silver.
The Survival System
The core of Outward is its survival model. Players must watch their warmth, hunger, fatigue and thirst constantly. Lose too much warmth in the cold and hypothermia sets in. Overeat and the character gets indigestion. Drink tainted water and sickness follows. Death is permanent, and there is no manual save — the game autosaves, and returning to an earlier checkpoint is impossible after a setback.
Combat rewards preparation. Jump into danger hungry or exhausted and the odds tip against you fast. That design forces a rhythm: gather resources, prepare gear, then venture out. It is a demanding loop, and it is also the game’s greatest strength.
The Story of Cierzo
The story opens with a shipwreck. The player character, an inhabitant of Cierzo, inherits a debt called a Blood Price from their ancestors — a debt that must be periodically paid. The voyage was meant to settle that debt. Now the character is shipwrecked, penniless, and given five days by desperate townsfolk to pay off the debt and keep the family holdings.
Once the debt is settled or the home seized, the game opens up. Three factions offer escape routes: the Holy Mission of Elatt, the Blue Chamber Collective, and the Heroic Kingdom of Levant. Each represents a different approach to the social order. The Blue Chamber wants to uphold the status quo. Levant wants to overthrow the Blood Price system entirely. The Holy Mission rejects the bloodline and social systems upheld by the Blue Chamber, but only because those systems hinder the forming of a unified front against the Scourge, an otherworldly force.
“They can free themselves of their bloodline by joining the Holy Mission of Elatt, enter a new spotless bloodline by helping the Blue Chamber Collective, or free themselves of the entire system through the Heroic Kingdom of Levant.”
These three factions are locked in a stalemate. Joining one breaks it, and global events begin to progress. The main storyline unfolds across three parallel paths, one per faction, each telling a piece of the larger story.
Combat and Progression
Combat leans on skill checks and stat gains, but earning them is slow. Spells are difficult to acquire, and skills must be earned by completing quests for NPCs or paying experts for training. Success or failure in these quests can permanently alter the game world and how the story moves forward — a character might be convinced to stay in a faction, or an important city might be destroyed if the player fails to kill certain targets.
Main quests carry time limits, though they typically span several months. The game is dense with content, and the depth of its systems means players rarely move through it at a steady pace.
What Works, What Does Not
The survival model is the game’s standout feature, but it is also what holds it back. The difficulty curve can be steep, and the autosave system removes any safety net once a player dies. That combination frustrates more than it rewards.
The factions offer genuine choice, and the story responds to player actions in ways that feel meaningful. The Scourge threat gives the factions a shared enemy, and the political stalemate gives the player’s decisions weight.
The game’s presentation is solid but unremarkable. The fantasy setting is familiar, and the third-person perspective keeps players close to the action.
Final Score
Outward succeeds at creating a survival RPG that feels more real and more consequential than most of its peers. Its systems demand attention, and that demand is the game’s defining quality. The story offers real choice, and the factions give the player a stake in the outcome.
But the autosave system, combined with the game’s punishing difficulty, means Outward asks a lot of its players. Some will find the challenge rewarding. Many will find it exhausting.
The game is currently available on PS4, PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Stadia. It is worth playing for anyone who enjoys survival mechanics, but newcomers should know what they are getting into.
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