In the opening moments of Outward 2, I receive what sounds like a simple quest: to find a flower with medicinal properties in the wilds to the west of the city, and deliver it to a doctor.
But I’m no dummy. (Note: I will soon prove myself to be a dummy.) I’ve played the original Outward, and I know just how dangerous the world can be outside the safety of a city, because unlike most survival games, your punishment for dying isn’t respawning safely back at home. No. It’s much, much worse.
As I set out to locate that flower, I don’t have much: a knife, a shield, some food and water, a tent, and a tiny backpack loaded with a few other supplies. I also don’t really know where the flower might be: there are no quest markers or helpful arrows or radar pips to guide me. Outward 2 doesn’t do that sort of thing. I’ll just need to explore and keep my eyes open.
Thankfully, there’s a touch of emergent behavior an untested adventurer can take advantage of, like when I spot two city soldiers marching up a hill near a large angry bird and a larger, angrier boar. They take turns fighting each other while I watch from a distance, until only the guards are left, at which point I scuttle over and loot the animal corpses. Free stuff! Someday I’ll be confident enough to kill things on my own, but for now, this is the safest option.
As I search for the quest flower and occasionally pilfer from animal corpses others have left behind, I meet a wandering trader. We chat, I sell him a couple things I’ve collected, and I briefly consider attacking him so I can have his cool, huge backpack. Then I remember that I probably suck at fighting, and I continue scurrying around fearfully.
But even I, Chris the Coward, eventually get careless. I spot a guy on the road fighting one of those birds, and I lurk nearby, ready to get my loot on when he’s finished. But when he finishes with the bird, he makes a beeline for me, brandishing a pike. He’s no friendly soldier—he’s a bandit.
I’m not really ready for actual combat. I forget to drop my backpack, which is important to do before a fight so you can dodge-roll quickly. I wait for him to attack so I can block and counter, but he’s no idiot: he waits too. Eventually, I do the dumb thing: I impatiently swing at him with my sword. He swiftly rolls right under my blow and jabs at me. Despite doing everything wrong thus far, I surprise myself by blocking his pike, and I swing at him three more times. He blocks each of my attacks and stabs me.
It’s pretty clear I’m going to lose this fight, but I don’t do as badly as I expect. I do get in a few slams with my shield, which I can use as an offhand weapon in addition to blocking, but I simply cannot connect with my sword. He rolls, he dodges, he blocks, he’s so blindingly fast that I might as well be swinging around a feather boa. I block and dodge him a bit, too, but he finally downs me with a double jab. The world goes black.
In Outward 2, as in the original survival RPG, your defeat doesn’t mean death. You simply don’t die in this game. I know immortality makes it sound like the easiest game ever, but it’s weirdly the opposite. Being respawned back at your comfy home at full health is easy. In Outward 2, you wake up somewhere else entirely.
Often, you don’t know where it is that you’ve respawned. I wake up in the dark, outside, with no real idea where I am or what direction the city is. Even if I had a map, which I don’t, it probably wouldn’t even be helpful because it wouldn’t show my position on it. It would just be a map.
I stumble around in the dark, looking for my backpack, which is lying some distance away. A little too late I spot someone else walking in the dark, and it’s another brigand. I flee. My stamina runs out, I get stabbed a few times, and once again the darkness overtakes me. At least I have a bit of good fortune: this time some thoughtful soul finds me and drags me back to the city, and I wake up in relative safety.
The bad news is that he’s got a friend nearby, and the worse news is that friend also has a friend.
After selling some odds and ends and buying a hat that will at least partially protect my head, I continue my streak of being a foolhardy idiot and rush out of the city to find that bandit for a rematch. I find him, or his clone, but the bad news is that he’s got a friend nearby, and the worse news is that friend also has a friend. I couldn’t defeat one creep, and three at once is way too much. Defeat yet again.
This time I wake up in a quarry, having been carried there by some kindly miners. I also wake up with something new: an injury. Getting your clock cleaned repeatedly in Outward 2 doesn’t just move you around the map against your will, it has consequences for your character’s constitution. My left wrist is now sprained, which means I can’t hold my shield (or anything else) in my offhand until it’s healed.
Injuries can’t be healed by simply glugging a potion or applying a bandage, either. I’d bought a splint before venturing out, which will help, but what I mostly need is time. I set down my tent and sleep until morning, but even after an entire night of rest my wrist is only about 40% healed. If I ever want to get back to the city, wherever it is, I’m going to need to look into alternate combat options.
Finally, I have some proper luck. While greedily looting the buildings those thoughtful miners dragged my unconscious body to, I find a flintlock pistol and a handful of bullets. I don’t need an offhand to shoot a gun, right? I leave the quarry and eventually find the bandit again (or at least a bandit). I shoot him once, and he stabs me a few times as I realize reloading an old-timey gun takes a good long while. I get off a second shot and the fight is over. It’s been days of pain and misery, but I’ve finally had my revenge.
Great, but… this wasn’t a quest for revenge, was it? I was supposed to be finding a friggin’ flower. Well, first I need to fully heal and regroup and come up with some sort of plan that doesn’t involve me getting stabbed unconscious quite so many times.
But I love this. I’ve re-learned an important lesson: defeat has real consequences so be careful picking fights. In the first game I would plan for ages before getting in a scrap: I’d set traps, I’d drop my backpack so I’d be more agile, I’d be as prepared as possible for an encounter instead of just blundering in. I need to practice that level of caution again or I’m never going to get anywhere.
As I head back to the city, I fall in behind another soldier on patrol, carefully looting all the dead animals he leaves in his wake. No more charging into combat for me, at least for a while. I’m gonna let other people do the fighting for me until I find that dang flower.
If you want to play Outward 2 ahead of its July 7 release date, there’s a closed beta happening now: here’s how to get in on it.
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