Outbound Preview: A Chill Adventure in a Van

Outbound is one of those games that I’ve been consistently coming across for a while now, especially in Steam. It looked interesting, but I wanted to try the game out for myself before making a final verdict on whether it’s worth getting. Fortunately, a demo for Outbound has just come out, providing the perfect opportunity to play it and see what it has to offer. I went in not feeling sure if I would like it. By the end of it, I was very sure I liked it – and my preview will explain why.

The demo of Outbound is now available on Steam. It’s current release window is set for Q2 2026.

Story – A World Itching to Be Explored

Outbound does have a backstory, of sorts, but it’s not deeply explored in the demo, which in this case is fine. The main purpose of the demo is to let you see what the gameplay is like. However, what we do know is that Outbound is set in the future, fortunately a utopian one. You take your van on a journey across various biomes, living off grid, scavenging and making use of what you find, exploring and stumbling across cool landmarks and locations.

We don’t yet know all the details of the story, like why we’re travelling around in a van off the grid and where everyone is. But it seems like it doesn’t really matter at this point. You don’t really need a reason. It’s just a cool, chilled experience.

Gameplay – Cruising Around in a Van

The demo of Outbound gives you a plethora of things to do. It’s not one of those demos where you only get to play a few minutes and a tiny portion of the game. The Outbound demo really allows you to properly engage in how it works – and that’s just from exploring one biome out of four!

Home Sweet Van

The core gameplay of Outbound is your trusty van. You not only use it to get from A to B, but also for camping, storing, and crafting. What’s great about Outbound is that to access these features, you have to interact with different parts of your van. For example, you need to open the front door and then select the wheel to drive, and lift open the back hatch to access the crafting station. 

Outbound does an excellent job of feeling realistic in your interactions with the van. However, it is thankfully not complicated to get anything done. Some of the steps required to take with completing some tasks, such as producing vouchers, can feel a bit confusing at first, but it’s quick to pick up.

The other realistic part of Outbound is keeping the van fuelled up. If you run out of juice, you’re not going anywhere. Keeping your van’s battery topped up is easy though. You just need to convert the battery power from resources such as wood. The battery doesn’t drain too quickly, not enough to become a frequent nuisance anyway. There’s a good balance of realism and avoiding frustration.

On the whole, there’s nothing more chilled out than packing your van up, jumping into the driver’s seat, and setting off to your next destination. To me, that’s what Outbound is all about.

The van functions as you vehicle, home, storage, and crafting station.

Living Off the Land

A key feature of Outbound is off the grid living. By this, you live in your van, from whatever resources you find in the world. Sleeping is easy; you simply select the bed inside the van when it’s late enough in the day. However, you need to eat too. You can find food out in the world such as berries and ginger. Berries fulfil your hunger, while ginger replenishes any lost health.

Resources are used for other purposes as well, notably crafting. These mainly consist of wood scattered around the world, as well as metal scraps. With the right materials, you can create new tools for further exploration and resource gathering and furniture to decorate your van with.

However, you first need to unlock blueprints to craft these new items. These can be found at download points around the world. At each post, you can choose from a handful of different blueprints. To get these blueprints, you need download vouchers, which you can get with the recycler machine by converting trash into vouchers.

When approaching these download points, you never know what you’re going to get. Although this is just the demo of Outbound, the range of unlockable items is impressive, and gives you a good idea of what to expect from the full release.

To gather bigger resources, you need to craft new tools like an axe and pickaxe.

A World to Explore

Outbound is a fully open world game. There are no loading screens to contend with. The only limits is based on the restrictions imposed by the demo, since you can only travel around the one biome. Also, some areas are inaccessible unless you gather the necessary materials or have the right tools to unblock the barrier.

For the demo alone, you get a pure sense of freedom casually cruising around in your van, looking for resources or download points or landmarks. The locations are interesting to visit and explore, such as the firewatch tower and treehouse. Outbound imposes a strong feeling of curiosity, compelling you to search every inch of the available map.

Although it’s just you in the world (unless you’re doing multiplayer), there’s something very alive about Outbound. Looking up in the sky, you can spy a distant plane and hot air balloon flying around. You don’t get a creepy sense that you’re not alone, neither do you feel the heavy burden of being lonely. You know that someone’s out there, and like you, they’re just living out their life.

Exploring the world and making discoveries never gets old.

A Custom Character and Home

Outbound allows you to customize not only your character, but also your van. The options at this point may feel a tad limiting, but this is the demo, and the full version hints at much broader customization options.

In the demo, only one type of van is available: the classic design, but you do get to see what the other options are, even if they are unavailable at this time, to get you hyped up. You can, however, customize the van. Not just by changing its color (and yes, there is a proper color wheel, not a limited number of swatches), but you can even customize the number plate, which is pretty cool and adds even more personification to your van.

The demo of Outbound also lets you customize your character. You can pick between a male and female, change skin tone, hair color, hair style, clothes, and even change the color palettes of your clothing. You can apparently unlock more clothing in the full game, which is something else to look forward to.

You can alter the appearance of your van and character – but there are no pets in the demo.

Graphics & Audio – A Calming Utopian Setting

Being a utopian setting, Outbound is welcomingly cheery and bright in its presentation. It’s not photorealistic, and yet it doesn’t feel overly cartoonish either. It has a pleasant organic look about it. The brightness doesn’t hurt your eyes, but when it is gloomier due to weather changes, it’s not horribly dulled out.

The van itself is wonderfully designed, being both attractive and practical. It’s easy to manage the van, automatically going to different parts to access different features, and it has a nicely realistic feel to its function.

The UI has a nice clean presentation as well, making navigation between different modes and menus easy to do and understand. All-in-all, nothing about Outbound looks off or out of place.

The music and sound design of Outbound are also worth a mention. Gentle optimistic music plays in the background during your travels, creating a mood rather than a distraction. The sound effects also enhance the immersion, particularly with the van. The sound of the ground crunching under the wheels as you drive along is especially soothing, and even simple things like the sound of a door shutting is satisfying. It’s all generally spot on.