Out and About

Out and About is a wholesome, nature-focused exploration game with a strong educational foundation. You play as a young person who visits their grandmother in the charming village of Portobello, only to find it devastated by a recent storm. Together, you set out to help rebuild the town, one task at a time.

The game follows the familiar structure of cozy life sims, but with a unique emphasis on foraging and plant identification. Your time is spent exploring natural environments, gathering plants, and using their leaves or flowers to craft recipes that benefit the townsfolk. The educational aspect is the core focus of the game: through quests and minigames, you’ll learn to identify over 100 real-life plants, their healing properties, potentially harmful look-alikes, and how much you can harvest from a plant before damaging it.

Identifying a plant starts with photographing an unknown patch of plants to add them to your compendium. This unlocks detailed information about their traits, uses, and some visual tips to help recognize them. After gathering their parts and filling your basket, you play a plant-sorting minigame, where you must identify the correct species out of three possible choices, based on a shown plant part (you are free to consult the compendium for that). Due to the limited backpack space, you’ll engage in this identification loop frequently, which reinforces learning through memory and repetition.

Unlike most life sims, Out and About has no energy or stamina system to limit your daily actions. Time progresses in four segments per in-game day, and each sorting minigame advances one of these. This design gives you the freedom to explore the game world, collect herbs, cook with locals, or chat with villagers at your own pace.

You can increase your relationships with NPCs by helping them achieve their goals or by inviting them to cook with you. Additionally, every three days you get to participate in a marketplace minigame where you sell your dishes to townsfolk by matching their healing properties to what each customer needs. The coins earned from these sales, as well as from completing quests, can be spent on rebuilding and upgrading the town.

While this game is quite engaging at first, it becomes grindy very fast, as unlocking new areas requires several in-game weeks of collecting enough coins to afford that expansion. Because there are no other activities to do during the day outside of foraging, this easily leads to repetitiveness or redundancy of harvesting in the same few zones. The developers have acknowledged this and are actively working on rebalancing income and costs during Early Access.

Beyond its beautifully crafted environments, the game also excels atmospherically, through the ambient details that create a serene and immersive world. While searching for plants, you’ll hear birds chirping in the forest, water flowing from streams and waterfalls or the sound of the ocean waves. Cute details like the main character hopping down the path add a very playful touch.
Playing it becomes a zen-like experience, filling you with peace and harmony with nature.

Character customization is another strong point of the game. The game offers a wide variety of customization options for the visuals of the main character, allowing players to customize (and to some extent colorize) facial features and clothing without enforcing a binary gender framework.

On the other hand, some elements still feel underdeveloped. There is a decent amount of town NPCs; however, most of them lack personality depth beyond their visual designs and unique traits. Their dialogues and, in general, character interactions could benefit from more individuality and growth. And although they are marked on the compass (if they’re in range), sometimes they can be difficult to find due to the layout of the town. Displaying them on the map or having a path indicator would surely help.

Overall, Out and About is a beautiful, atmospheric and educational game that invites players to slow down and reconnect with nature while also teaching them real-life knowledge of plants. The game is currently in Early Access, yet it already offers a strong foundation for something special. With some polishing, better balancing and the addition of Steam achievements, it could easily become a standout title in the cozy sim genre and a must-play, especially for those interested in botany or those seeking a comforting, nature-based experience.