Outpath: First Journey is a free demo that's like Forager in first-person

Last week, developer David Moralejo Sánchez released Outpath: First Journey, a free "prologue chapter" for a first-person mix of clicker and crafting due in 2023. As of right now, it has an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam and over 700 reviews.

In Minecraft, you punch trees, gather resources, and gradually kit yourself out until you're able to survive the night and build your grand creative vision. In idle games, you gradually accrue resources which you spend in order to accrue future resources more swiftly.

Outpath: First Journey smooshes these two things together. You gather resources, you craft items and machinery, and they in turn accrue you more resources; or, you don't, and you play it like an idle game where progress is tied to time rather than your own activity. Either way, eventually you buy more land to expand upon, and eventually you automate every part of the process.

There's another way to describe this: it's first-person Forager, which already mixed idle and survival games, island-buying and all. That's not a bad thing, given how much time I put into Forager. Or, it is a bad thing, given how much time I put into Forager. These sorts of games are deadly time sinks. I do wonder, however, if being embodied from a first-person perspective will stop players running Outpath in the background, unattended, as idle games are intended to be.

You can grab Outpath: First Journey for free from Steam. There's also a store page for the full game, Outpath, with a planned release date of sometime in 2023.

Thanks, PC Gamer.