The second I’ve dropped my bags in whatever rundown cabin I’ve moved into in a farming simulator, I’m usually out the door and picking up whatever is lying around on the floor outside. I absolutely love a foraging mechanic, so when I first saw Out and About, a game that turns this one mechanic into an entire coherent experience, I immediately added it to my wishlist. But as is the way with a lot of foraging-based mechanics and games, I did feel a bit concerned that Out and About would be quite basic when it eventually launched, rather than satisfying the need for an in-depth foraging experience.
After spending a decent amount of time scouring the land surrounding Portobello for all sorts of edible goodies, I have been completely reassured that Out and About knows exactly what it’s doing, and it does it incredibly well. In fact, the foraging has been so carefully thought out, that you can take what you learn from the game and apply it to real life. All of the plants are fairly common things you’ll more than likely have around where you live, and the game is filled with recipes that you can recreate step by step. It’s basically like an interactive foraging guide without the need to sit down and study pages and pages of a textbook.
There are tonnes of plants for you to wander around tracking down and learn about, and each time you correctly identify one with your handy flashcards, given at the start of the game, you can start the process of picking them. Unlike a lot of games where you just pluck the entire plant or mushroom from the ground, you have to carefully consider which part you want to take back to the kitchen. At the bottom of the screen, there’s a little bar which tells you how happy the plant is. As you strip away flowers and leaves this bar decreases and makes the plant unhappy. Take too much, and you’ll stunt its regrowth just like you can do in real life if you pick too much of something.
Finding the plants you need for recipes is also made more challenging by the fact a lot of the edible plants you come across will grow amongst similar looking, incredibly poisonous counterparts. For example, wild garlic grows next to lily of the valley, which looks similar to the untrained eye but if you eat it, you will be seriously ill and, well… possibly dead. Luckily, you’re told the ins and outs of how to tell the two apart. So, if you are feeling brave enough to go out and hunt for wild garlic in real life, you’ll probably be a lot more confident in your ability to not poison yourself.
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Once you’re done carefully picking your plant parts, you’ll need to take them to a sorting table. When you interact with a table, you’re shown your plant parts again but with no guidance, and you have to correctly identify what they are to sort them. You can check little illustrations for a hint, but for the most part it’s a test to see how much you remember. You do this each time too, no matter how many times you’ve sorted a certain plant or mushroom, which really hammers in the identifiers you’ve learnt along the way. I appreciated that there was one of these tables conveniently in each area you unlock, so you didn’t have to constantly make the trek back to Portabello to sort your bag into your inventory too.
The cooking also deserves a more in-depth mention. Although it’s not as hands-on as you’d probably expect since you just pick a recipe from the book—plus who you want to cook with—and you’re whisked through the process in a cutscene. But, the fact remains that the recipes you create in-game can then be made in real life. Food like pestos, bread, and soup, all the way to essential oils and balms are available to unlock and you can visit the coinciding website, CuriosityNook, to find the recipe at any time if you do want to recreate it too.
Details like this only reinforce just how much care has gone into creating such a laid-back foraging experience, and I hope it encourages people to learn more about the things you can make from easy to gather items. When so many games broadly label forageable items generically like “berries” and “mushroom” it can really shatter the ability to immerse yourself into it fully. But Out and About sunk its hooks into me from the second I identified my first Broadleaf Plantain, and I’ve already spent hours scouring every inch of land from the forest to the sea in search of plants, flowers, and fungi to pick.
It’s a great gateway into foraging, and a fantastic virtual alternative for those who already know what they’re doing. Even if you’ve got absolutely no interest in venturing out for yourself and seeing what you can find, it’s just an equal parts fun and educational simulator at the end of the day. I really hope future DLCs and updates add more areas with new forage, but for now I’m quite happy just walking around Portobello’s surrounding areas and picking up things I can now confidently identify on my next real-life dog walk.
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