Outward is a fantasy adventure focused on an ordinary character surviving against the odds. There's a focus on realism rather than superpowers or magical abilities. You have to look after your warmth, hunger, fatigue, illness, and thirst as well as the more common battling monsters and collecting gold.

This makes it a challenging game that isn't for everyone but persevere at developing your character, a large amount of travelling by foot and gaining competency and this offers a rare and rewarding cooperative role-play adventure. It has some rough edges, being from a smaller team, but if the game clicks these don't matter.

If you die in battle, you may be imprisoned by enemies or, if you have developed suitable relationships, brought back to safety by other game characters. You lose progress and equipment if you die without help, but you can save your progress frequently.

Obtaining weapons, learning spells and other advancement is intentionally difficult to achieve. The game aims to create a sense of powerlessness and caution as much as the call to adventure. Skills and stat increases must all be earned by completing quests or paying experts to receive training.

Quests have multiple outcomes, and success or failure can permanently affect the game world and how the story progresses, such as a character being convinced to stay in a faction, or an important city being permanently destroyed if the player fails to kill certain characters.

You play as an inhabitant of the city of Cierzo, shipwrecked off the coast of your home city. You are tasked with paying a family dept in five days, before choosing whether to walk away from your bloodline by joining the Holy Mission of Elatt, join a new family by helping the Blue Chamber Collective, or turn your back on the patriarchal system through the Heroic Kingdom of Levant. Which of these three factions you choose determines how the game unfolds and your part in it.