Outpath from David Moralejo Sánchez and Silver Lining Interactive looks a little bit like Minecraft, but with a unique charm all of its own.

“An experimental clicker base building game. Craft, gather & manage resources, build your base and buy more islands to exploit and expand!”

What you get with Outpath is a crafting title. You should know how these work by now, you start with nothing, you hit a tree a few times and now have some wood, you use that wood to make a crafting table and learn how to make more things using more resources. Keep going, keep gathering resources, keep building new stuff, and you’re playing a crafting game.

As I mentioned in the intro, this does have a Minecraft vibe, and that is plain to see. The purposely pixelated graphics, the bright colours, the gentle piano music, etc. Of course, there’s the crafting side too. Yet, while Outpath has those Minecraft basics, it changes things up when it comes to exploration. You don’t get a massive map with (almost) limitless exploration as with Minecraft. Instead, you get a small collection of randomly generated and small islands. You can expand and generate more islands, which offer different biomes and different resources. So the game does open up, but not to the mass freedom that Minecraft offers. This is by no means a negative, I really liked the more restrictive and small islands, but constantly new biomes. It kept me wanting to play more to see what was coming next.

The crafting works just how you expect it to and Outpath isn’t going to win any awards for being original, how the game looks is exactly how the basics play. But something does not need to be original to be fun, and Outpath is a lot of fun. There’s an in-game currency called credits and you earn credits whenever you gather resources. These credits can be used to unlock new buildables and even upgrade your skills. Yep, you have skills and when you open up a new set of islands, there will be skill books to find. You also use these credits to expand each biome. The main gameplay loop is relaxing and you can lose hours very quickly as the game keeps opening up and offering you new things to build.

From very basic and humble beginnings, Outpath slowly grows on you and really begins to add layers while still keeping everything simple to understand and follow. You will need to put the hours in (and lots of them) to get the most out of this one. The tutorial is very, very light, and the game expects you to just teach yourself. But as this is such a calm and chilled title that experimenting and seeing what does and does not work is a big part of the fun. Available now for PC and all the consoles, the console versions are a new release as Outpath was released on the PC a few years back now. Check it out, it’s a relaxing game with a lot to learn.