Remember the last time you played a fantasy RPG? Chances are you were the center of that experience: the chosen one, the savior, a diamond in the rough waiting to rise to the occasion. The thing is that we can't all be the chosen one. How would a normal citizen survive the fantasy madness we see so frequently in games and on TV? Chances are we wouldn't, but if you're curious to try it, Outward might be your cup of tea, potion — or your demise.

We sat down with game designer and President of Nine Dot Games, Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, at Gamescom 2018 to embark on a short local co-op journey into the harsh world of Outbound.

It is an intriguing but inherently frustrating endeavor to not be special. That's the first and final lesson you learn in Outbound. You start as a normal guy who doesn't know how to survive. A story follows, but essentially, the game wants you to feel vulnerable and earn your place in the world. You'll likely pay with your life a couple of hundred times in the process.

Outward marries serious survival mechanics, so you're required to drink, eat, sleep, and watch out for diseases and weather conditions. Basically, you need to make sure you're prepared at any point in the game. To showcase this firsthand, we jumped in with two almost completed character builds toward the end of the game: I was Sigil (the Mage), and Boucher-Vidal was my Imbue backup. One would think that these completed builds would make things easier on us, and they probably did, but I didn't know any better.

Outward is special, and it wants to be. It's a tough fantasy RPG world that's free of handholding or conveniences that we've grown accustomed to. Storming the enemy in a flurry of attacks means certain death. There are many factors that determine our fighting performance, even beyond the previously mentioned survival aspects.

It is frustrating, and you will die a lot. Boucher-Vidal loves difficult experiences, and he knows Outward is a frustrating one. Again, rushing into battle is never a good option, but as we were playing the demo together, we did it anyway — and we died and died. We eventually brewed some potions over a quiet campfire to talk about our anxieties of venturing out again.

Regardless of whether you're playing co-op, your trusty companion is your backpack. It carries your resources, which are as much of value as are your weapons. Backpacks slow you down in the heat of battle, like when you're dodging. The best course of action is to lose the backpack for dire encounters, so you can move freely. It is entirely possible to ditch the backpack altogether and share one pack if you're in a group with an archer, for example, who attacks from the rear.

Over the course of our demo, we didn't try to complete a particular objective; we just ventured in one direction and hoped we wouldn't die. Enemies weren't hiding, of course, and we soon tried our blades in the first encounter, which my mage barely survived.

Some spells have prerequisites before you can craft them, but placing sigils and casting spells are deliberate actions. Once a sigil is placed, you can cast spells from within it. They don't have to match, so you can place a wind sigil and use a fire spark to cast a thunder/electro spell. Using spark in a fire sigil lets us throw fireballs. While I was still trying to wrap my head around the natural order of spellcasting in Outward, I used my physical weapon to take care of the witches who were near our camp. Close combat isn't a safe bet, either, as my double-handed weapon was slow, and combat isn't just about smashing the face buttons. Waiting, rolling, and attacking in deliberate order is required. Bear in mind, that we were playing well-equipped and built characters, so imagine the horrors a new character would face in this world.

Coming from an exhausting battle that killed one of us and left the other one gravely wounded, we needed to rest. Camps were built, and guard schedules were set up to reduce our risk of getting ambushed. When we embarked from our 13-hour slumber (we were done for), our thirst also severely slowed us down. Water needed to be found and boiled to make it drinkable and to regenerate properly. The next question became: Where do we go next?

The map won't show where you are, so you'll have to find your approximate whereabouts based on nearby landmarks, which are in turn marked on the map. The game generally doesn't throw information at your feet; it wants you to discover it on your own. Recipes for cooking or alchemy can be learned by either finding or acquiring them, or by trial and error, but you have to work for them. They won't come to you, and most of them aren't exactly "guessable."

In a game so tightly designed around survival in a fantasy setting, death is an integral part of the process. Outward has a distinct way of dealing with death, as it will have context-sensitive outcomes to your demises. There is no permadeath, and the game autosaves constantly, so death is just something you have to deal with. A bandit may kill you, rob you, and leave you — or carry you to their camp. You may get saved by a lone wanderer, or you may be sold to a slave camp. The game keeps you on your toes, and while doing so, it accepts the fact that it might also piss you off. Outcomes aren't all negative, and there is a fail state that returns you to the city with a moderate amount of health if you die too many times in a row without sleeping in between.

Outward doesn't look extraordinary, especially when placed next to other fantasy RPGs, but the gameplay is certainly note-worthy. The ingredients have been seen elsewhere, but it's the consistency with which they are implemented and pulled off that makes Outward so remarkably frustrating and challenging. It's a hardcore experience that wants to be played so you can laugh at everyone who thinks Dark Souls is a hard game. This could be the couch co-op game that you play with friends for the challenge. Frustrating moments can end up in a slave camp, but you laugh about it because it was a fun demise — an adventure that happened, not a punishment.

It remains to be seen how much Outward manages to keep frustration and reward in check. It'll be interesting to see how it positions itself in the market. I'm certainly curious to get my hands on the full game in Feb. 2019 to see if I can make it through in one piece.