Steam Next Fest – Outbound

From Outbound’s Steam Page: Explore a colourful world and build your own cozy home on wheels. Craft workstations, and source energy from the sun, wind, or water. Upgrade and customize your vehicle, grow crops, and live sustainably off grid with up to 4 players.

RELEASE DATE: Q2 2026

DEVELOPER: Square Glade Games

PUBLISHER: Square Glade Games

GENRE: Adventure, Casual, Indie, Simulation, Sports

One of my most anticipated demos of Steam Next Fest, and it did not disappoint. This open-world exploration game starts with you being able to customize your van’s colours (style available in the full game) and your character’s appearance. Body types, characteristics of physical appearance and your clothing all have multiple options and colour choices for each.

The demo does a very good job of teaching you the mechanics slowly. Driving, parking at a camping spot, collecting materials and lighting a fire. Next, you learn how to set up your camp and build in your van. Machines to help you recycle bottles and cans into vouchers, a mini sawmill to turn logs into planks, a food processor etc. Each machinery item needs a blueprint that can be found by completing tasks, accessing terminals at towers and unlocking computers. Discover landmarks and diverse biomes.

You use the vouchers from your recycling machine to download and open new items at the locked computers at bigger checkpoint areas, like a large tree house area available in the demo. There are animals you can feed and pet, cairns to stack rocks on, a lot of collectibles and items to log. While you are upgrading and exploring, you will also need to maintain your camper van. It runs on biomaterials, inputting fibre from plants to recharge its battery. I believe you’ll also be able to use solar and wind power in the full game.

The graphics were lovely; the music and sounds completed the outdoor, cozy aesthetic. You can drive in first or third person, and this is fantastic and very helpful for someone like me who can suffer from motion sickness often in first-person driving games. I loved the small detail of the border you could see along the edges of what was unavailable during the demo; the boundary even had reflective properties while the headlights hit them at night. This made it clear what you had access to and teased you just enough to want to explore more.

In the full game, you’ll be able to plant a garden to have your own food sources, and you’ll also be able to adopt a new friend who you can feed, pet and train to help you.

I enjoyed playing this solo. It’s the type of game I can see myself losing hours in the game once it launches. There is co-op available, up to 4 people playing together. I am curious what that would feel like, playing with friends, and I will hopefully dive into that at some point as well. The demo barely touches the surface of what you’ll be able to do, and I am excited to see what else I’ll be able to do. The demo did a fantastic job of leaving me wanting more. Well done, let’s go camping…soon.

Until then…be good to yourself and be good to each other.