Outward is a game I've tried to enjoy multiple times. I've even installed mods that borderline on cheats, just to see if I could bypass its core design and find the fun. It never works. The problem isn't the difficulty; it's that every system feels engineered to be a chore, turning a survival adventure into a laborious checklist.

The “Burn” system is a perfect example of this anti-fun design. You sleep in your home, prepare, and leave town... you’re already down -10% max stamina just from walking out the front gate. You fight a few basic creatures, take a hit, and the penalty is back, now lowering your total health. As a bonus, you might catch a free wilderness disease that screws your stats even further.

To fix your health and stamina, you either sleep or use consumables. So you pack your adventure bag with food, water, medicine… and now you’re overweight and can barely loot. If you take the tent and cooking pot to fix thoses during your journey, you're even more overweight, but at least you can sleep and cook in the wild. If you die, you respawn with 80% of your stats burned out and must trek back to town, a trip that can take 15+ minute just to sleep it off, or use your tent, you still have to trek back to town to sell and restock though.

You spend the entire game in a state of need: missing stamina, low on health, sick, overweight, hungry and thirsty. Outward isn't an adventure, it's slowly crawling across empty landscapes with an overstuffed backpack to clear a Point of Interest, only to find nothing of real value in it.

Exploration could be rewarding, but it never is. The effort to reach a location, clear it, and recover is never matched by the reward. Instead, 95% of your wealth comes from gathering herbs and fish to cook meals and brew tea to sell. You kill bandits and monsters, but their gear isn't worth(cheap and heavy) carrying back, so you salvage it for crafting materials… to make more craft to sell.

Combat rarely feels satisfying. It’s either a slow, stamina-starved slog that drags on forever, or you use every tools : traps, guns, poison, buffs... to delete an enemy in 5-10 seconds. There's no engaging middle ground.

That's Outward in a nutshell: a game where the developers never found... and probably (most likely) never tried to find a middle ground between punishing realism and rewarding gameplay. Every single mechanic feels like a chore, turning what could be a gritty adventure into a relentless cycle of maintenance with no payoff.

yes

one of those games