| Quick Verdict: Out and About has an adorable premise of using real plants and recipes to craft and sell in order to restore a town. It’s foraging, cooking, and exploration, so it should be a hit. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that’s dragging it down and makes gameplay feel more of a slog than a cute, relaxing game. |
| Game: | Out and About |
| Developer(s): | Yaldi Games |
| Publisher: | Yaldi Games |
| Review Score: | 7 |
| Cozy Score: | 7 |
| Price: | $17.99 |
| Pros: | The game uses real plants and real plant-based recipes. There’s a lot of customization in your character, including being able to put in your own pronouns. |
| Cons: | Fast travel is turned off due to glitches and there is no way to run. If you don’t have certain quests tagged, they won’t count as being complete. Getting money is a grind and areas with crucial plants are behind a hefty price. Collected plants and crafted recipes will go bad over time and you can only sell so much on market days. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Exploration |
Out and About is an exploration game that uses real-world plants and recipes as its foundation. You are the granddaughter of a local in Portobello, a close-knit community on the water, who has come to visit your grandma. Unfortunately, your first night there, a tumultuous storm blows in and causes catastrophic damage, resulting in a landslide.
With the town in disarray, your only way to help contribute is to help the locals, forage for ingredients, and use what you find to create food and aids to sell at the local marketplace. Doing so will earn you money that you can use in the restoration efforts.
Out and About is a lovely premise and it has a lot of potential, but there are several factors that are holding it back from being as good as it can be. Visually, the game is stunning and there’s clearly been a ton of care and research put into making sure the plants are all unique and accurate.
This game thrives in its authenticity. All the plants are real and while you can’t take what you learn in Out and About and apply it to real foraging without further research, you’ll still learn far more about plants as you play. You even get a sense of what those plants could be used for based on the recipes.
I felt like the variance of plants helped to round out the environment and the amount of customizability in the character definitely left you with a sense of representation, right down to being able to write in your own pronouns.
I do have to caution that you need to be super happy with your character before you commit, however. I swear the game said that I could change my character later, but I’ve yet to find any way to change the features. This is a little frustrating because you can’t spin the character 360 to know what’s going on from all angles. So, the side that you see the most, you can’t see in customization.
What happens at the back of your head isn’t your business until it’s the only thing you can see
In terms of gameplay, you can expect to spend most of your time running around the town talking to people, foraging, and making recipes. Generally, the townsfolk will have a few quests for you that will help further some plot or encourage you to progress in a certain direction. Aside from that, once you open the calendar, you’ll have daily tasks that you can do to improve friendships and earn a little bit of money.
These quests are essential because they’re the only way you’ll be able to earn money aside from market days. You can only run the stall every three days, so money is going to be a constant issue. You’re put on a bit of a tight leash, honestly. In order to get money, you have to run the market, but you can only stock 15 items in the market, so you’re capped at how much you can earn.
The only other hustle is to do the daily quests, but you have to get lucky because you’re blocked from most of the map. You have to save up in order to open up more foraging areas, meaning that you’re locked out of some of the necessary plants to further the story and that may be requested in the dailies.
Provided that you get good quests, you have to remember to track them in order for it to count. I’ve done a lot of foraging, only for it not to matter because I didn’t track the quest first. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure it’s not glitched because there was a day that I did everything, only for it not to count, and even after tracking the quests and redoing them, it still didn’t count.
So, if you can get the quests to work and they have ones you can do, you’re looking at about 200-ish coins per day. On market days, you’re looking at about 400-ish coins. That means that in order to save up the 2000 coins needed to open up a new area, you’ll have to play 8 in-game days with all five quests working and counted. If you don’t have quests that work, then you’re looking at about 10-ish days.
That’s a lot of in-game days to just mill around, especially when the NPCs start asking for plants that you can’t get to and stalling their questlines.
Please, sir, I want some more… progress.
I don’t know why the market is so capped. My only guess is that they were worried about people being able to advance too quickly and in doing so, they made it feel like a grind. I can understand the market being open only every 3 days, but having only 15 slots to sell things feels bad. That’s 15 items total, by the way. You can’t stack items, so if you made 10 yarrow tinctures, that’s 10 slots.
Not only that, but foraged items go bad, as do recipes you’ve made. So, the foraging and crafting part of what makes Out and About so fun and cozy is nerfed. You can forage all you’d like, but without a way to sell it all, you’re wasting your time.
Which brings me to the last little bit of info that really puts this game into slog mode. Your foraging basket is only so big, so you have a finite amount of space for items. In order to move them from your basket, you need to take them to a sorting table. You have a bit of a mini-game moment where you’re shown your foraged items and you have to guess what they are.
This repetition is great because you learn more visually about identifying a plant and it gives you community coins that you can use. However, by using the sorting table, you’ll advance time. This means that you only have so much that you’re physically able to forage in a day. So, if you mess up like I did and don’t properly track your quests, you may not be able to repeat the foraging steps for the day if you don’t have enough time left in the day to do so.
Add in the fact that fast travel has been turned off due to some glitching with no way to run means you’re doing this all at a snail’s pace. The map is huge and that should be a point in its favor, but you have to run for several minutes to get from one side of the map to the other. With some patrons preferring the beach and others preferring the campsite, you’re running around far more than is enjoyable.
At this point, I might as well be taking the Hobbits to Isengard…
Out and About is an exploration game on rails due to the obstacles that keep you from really enjoying the primary aspects of the game. I could understand keeping places from being accessed if the requests for certain ingredients in those places weren’t asked for so quickly. By around day 4, you’re getting requests for blackberry leaves and since you can’t access those, it just stays there.
You may be thinking, well, that’s halfway to opening an area since you said it’s only about 8 days of saving. It would be if the game hadn’t been prompting you to spend all your coins on smaller cleanup projects or forcing you to buy gloves and a mushroom brush in order to forage stinging nettles and mushrooms.
You’re basically herded into this corner where your entire day is simply trying to fulfil daily quests and waiting for the market that you can’t over-prepare for or else you’re losing product. Every so often, you get a little mini-game of guessing ingredients or matching recipes to customer requests, but that loses its charm quickly.
Like I said, Out and About has a lot of potential, but it needs some fine-tuning. I got to a point where all I could do was daily quests because the NPCs were requesting things I couldn’t access yet. And provided I could do all of the daily quests with the plants available to me, I had to hope they’d register.
If it wasn’t a market day, I’d just go to bed and start it all over again. You do that over and over and over until you save up enough to open a new area. At that point, you get to make progress with NPCs, but then you’re back in the saddle of hitting a roadblock and needing to grind again.
Watch the trailer for Out and About!
It feels a bit like being stuck in purgatory and that’s not what you want. Sadly, I struggle to find the joy in the tedium and that sucks because it has the ability to be such a joyous and relaxing game. Maybe the problem is trying to gamify it too much. I know this is the first game for this studio and I think they went a bit too far in one direction in trying to provide enough content. But the exploration, foraging, and crafting ARE the content. So, capping them unfortunately works against its primary purpose.
I’m hoping that the daily quests get some patches so that they just work without needing to be tracked and that the fast travel is reimplemented. These things really drag down the experience. Provided they get fixed, even with the other obstacles, I feel like my playthrough would have been much improved.
Lastly, the game isn’t a small price. I normally hate talking about value because I believe that devs should get the bag that they worked so hard for. However, the frustrations as they are don’t really justify the $18 price tag at this moment, which I hate having to say.
If you’d like to try out Out and About, I’d wait for more patches, but if you can’t wait for that, you can grab it over on Steam for $17.99. Otherwise, you can stick around a bit longer and check out my thoughts on some other games like Hello Kitty Island Adventure or Is This Seat Taken?
