Picture this: you're cruising through a forest in a beat-up campervan, dog riding shotgun, backpack stuffed with foraged mushrooms, a satellite tower blinking on the horizon. That's the vibe Square Glade Games has bottled with Outbound, their open-world road trip sim that just landed on Nintendo Switch 2.
Here's the thing: Outbound doesn't try to be anything other than what it is. A relaxing, low-stakes adventure through forests, grasslands, rocky canyons, and sandy beaches where the biggest threat to your survival is forgetting to eat some berries. For a certain kind of player, that's exactly the pitch.
What the gameplay loop actually feels like
The core rhythm is collect, craft, explore, repeat. You gather wood and scrap metal to upgrade your van, repair broken bridges and roads, and unlock new biomes as you go. Crafting splits into two systems: a minigame where you tap A to hit a cursor on a green bar for van and tool upgrades, and a set-and-forget machine system for processing materials and food, similar to how Spiritfarer handles its cooking. Pop raw items in, go explore, come back to finished planks and bread.
That loop compounds nicely. An hour in you're already juggling multiple machines and missions. And just when the map starts feeling familiar, a new area opens up and the world expands again.
You also get a dog. The dog has its own backpack. The dog can stay by the van or follow you around. This is not a minor detail.
Outbound supports online co-op for up to 4 players in a single van, sharing machines and objectives. Local co-op is not available at launch.
The bumps in the road
No ride is perfectly smooth. The campervan handles fine on designated paths, but take it off-road and you'll be reaching for the unstuck option more than you'd like. It's a forgiving system, but it does break immersion when you're wedged against a rock for the fifth time.
Customisation is another area that needed more polish. Decorating your van in first-person view feels fiddly, with the analogue stick sometimes requiring multiple nudges to lock onto the right object. The Switch 2's mouse function could have helped here, but it isn't supported.
The story, or rather the near-absence of one, is the most noticeable gap. Environmental hints of other people exist: cabins, drying laundry, half-eaten food. But whatever narrative thread those details are meant to pull together never quite materialises. Players who came to Outbound from something like Firewatch will feel that absence more sharply.
Van customisation in first-person
How it holds up on Switch 2 hardware
Performance is solid. No stuttering frame rates, no painful load times. That's worth noting because early demo builds reportedly had performance issues, and Square Glade Games clearly put work into the Switch 2 version before launch.
The visual trade-offs are minor but real. Background objects like trees and rocks pop in as you approach them, and the image quality softens in handheld mode. The colour palette itself is genuinely lovely, with warm golden-hour skies and layered greens across the grasslands, though oversaturation creeps in during night sequences and bad weather.
Audio is the weakest link. The game leans into natural ambience (birds, rustling leaves, rain) but the stretches of silence in the woods tip from peaceful into unsettling a little too often. Piano music appears, disappears, and doesn't follow any consistent logic. Sound cues for completing structural repairs are almost nonexistent, which feels like a missed opportunity for satisfying feedback.
Who this is actually for
Fans of simulation games with a cosy bent, think Disney Dreamlight Valley or Spiritfarer, will find a lot to like here. The gameplay loop is genuinely hard to put down, the world keeps expanding in ways that feel rewarding rather than padded, and the environmental message (wind farms, recycling, plant-based fuel) sits lightly enough that it never feels preachy.
What most players miss is just how much content is packed into what looks like a simple driving game. Collectibles, bridge repairs, satellite towers, biome unlocks, a crafting chain that grows more involved as you progress. There's easily 20-plus hours here for completionists.
The $49.99 price point puts it in the same bracket as bigger Switch 2 releases, which may give some players pause given the story and audio shortcomings. A demo is available if you want to test the waters first.
For players ready to commit, our Outbound guides collection covers the crafting systems and biome unlocks in detail, so you won't spend your first few hours wondering why your van keeps running out of fuel.
