""My co-founder Mark and I, we both love the idea of owning a camper van," Square Glade Games co-founder and studio director Tobias Snackernberg tells me. "It's a very cool dream, but in practice it's very impractical when you have a family, a job, and you need income, all that kind of stuff. So Outbound basically creates this alternative where you can at least live it digitally.""
""When you drive that route, it's very remote, it's just through a field of these gigantic wind turbines that are basically placed next to the highway left and right," he explains. "As I was driving through the wind turbines, I thought it was a really cool image. I think it's the symbolism that is really nice, and I was like, can we make a game that features stuff like this?""
The climate crisis often appears in games as bleak or gimmicky, but some developers pursue optimistic, sustainable visions. Online football sim Rematch offered one such example, and Rebound plans a cosy open-world exploration where players live sustainably in a camper van. Square Glade Games designed Outbound to recreate the camper-van dream digitally, acknowledging real-life impracticalities like family, work, and income. Visual inspirations include drives past fields of wind turbines and a Studio Ghibli–inspired Chobani 'Dear Alice' yoghurt commercial scored by Joe Hisaishi. The game aims to celebrate renewable-energy symbolism and hopeful representations of farming and sustainable living.
Read at Creative Bloq
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