Out and About sees you visiting your grandmother and learning about the real world plants that surround a mountainside town.
A natural disaster strikes while you’re visiting your grandmother. In the aftermath, you’ll find a lot of fallen trees and hard-to-follow paths, but this encourages you to explore and talk to the other people in town. As you wander, you can take pictures of plants and use those pictures to identify them. These plants are based on real plants, with the idea being that you can casually learn about the natural flora in your own travels.
Once you have taken a picture of a plant, you then get a bunch of information on what to look for to identify it. Often that’s petal shape, leaf shape, and stem shape. You can then tick these off to decide which plant is which. You’ll then get a little information on if it’s safe to eat or use in some way (or if it’s poison). There are also sorting tables in Out and About that give you a plant part (leaves, for example, or petals) and three names. It’s sort of like a quiz, challenging you to name the plant based on the part that you are seeing.
There is a big focus on mindful gathering in Out and About as each plant you try to harvest has a bar at the bottom of the screen. If you take too much of the plant, it will stop growing and there will be nothing left for anyone else to pick or for the plant to further grow. It’s important to ensure the growth of wildlife, so this part of gathering is very refreshing. You can also use these plants to cook different dishes and create remedies for townsfolk.
I played a limited demo of Out and About at Gamescom this year and I found the game to be stunning. There are so many beautiful parts of the game and so many wonderful plants to identify. The characters you meet as you’re picking plants are also very friendly and helpful as they try to navigate the aftermath of this big storm, too.
Out and About is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.
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