You’ll have to enjoy certain kinds of games to really get the best out of Outward. A swift glance at it in action may suggest a ‘Dark Souls clone’, but in all honesty, it’s much deeper and far more intimidating than that.

Outward is indeed an action RPG with more than a nod toward’s From Software’s series. It even features an eerily similar quick menu on the HUD. This and the combat is about it, however. The game is more open world and the monsters are far from your only obstacle.

You begin the story washed ashore in what turns out to be your homeland, and after staggering to a nearby camp and passing out with exhaustion, you soon discover that you’re not exactly in for a heroes welcome.

Safely back at your home, you find you’re in a blood debt that needs paying in a matter of days. With little in the way of options in town to make money, you must head outside the gates and try to earn the coin out in the dangerous wilds, and boy is it dangerous. That’s just the start of the story though, and your journey will take you, an ordinary citizen with high vulnerability, to some frighteningly tough places (though you’ll be able to tackle it with a friend in local or online co-op if you want. We didn’t test that at this time though).

Outward is structured closer to a regular RPG, with hub areas, NPC’s handing out quests, and a grind to progress. The grind is not so much about stats as it is in the game’s key component, survival. Truly the survival in Outward is where the game currently shines brightest, and also where it may lose some people.

This is a fantasy world, filled with beasts and magic, yet it holds a refreshing degree of realism due to its unrelenting survival core. You can end up afflicted by any number of diseases, illnesses or injuries, and not just from enemy attack, but from poor diet, incorrect clothing choices, and well… doing stupid reckless shit. In fact, not paying enough attention got me into plenty of interesting situations where small emergent stories crop up (I ended up imprisoned at least twice for messing with the wrong people). Death doesn’t really come, rather you pass out and end up somewhere else. Sometimes you get rescued, sometimes you barely crawl away from your experience, but whatever happens, it’s tended to be interesting, if occasionally frustrating depending on where I’ve ended up in relation to what I’d been doing. The lesson here is to plan and be sensible.

Outward is all about planning, and improvisation when the planning fails. You can do temporary fixes on the fly, maybe tear up a shirt to make bandages for instance, but you really have to come prepared and to do that, you’ll need to keep plenty of stuff handy.

You can only carry a finite amount of items on your person though, and when you need weapons, water, food, camping equipment and more, that’s a daunting prospect. Here enter the backpacks, the beautifu damn backpacks. You can store additional items in a bag that you carry around with you. They start small, raggedy and humble, but you can find bigger, better ones around the place. The trade-off for more and more space is that you have less and less mobility.

That makes combat trickier, especially when taking on more agile predatory animals. Smartly, this means you need to plan out where you’re going to go, how far it is, and what’s essential for the trip. If you’re crossing multiple types of terrain, for example, you need plenty of clothing, prepared foods, and item variation if you’re going to survive dehydration, freezing, etc, etc. It gives the simple act of walking a vicious edge.

Handily, you are able to dump your backpack at a moments notice. A good strategy if a fight is hard and requires only basic inventory, or if a quick escape is an optimum solution for the time being. You can come back and retrieve it once the situation has deescalated, but naturally, it’s another set of risks to just leave hard earned cash and saleable items out there unattended.

The combat itself is still in need of some tweaking and polishing ahead of next month’s launch. It’s a little too loose as it stands, and lacks the heft needed to really feel like its a part of the game’s realistic mechanics. What it does currently do right is making each battle, big or small, feel like it matters. You always stand to gain something from each fight or escape, whether that be valuable items (in Outward, even the smallest item finds feel like an accomplishment) or simply knowledge and strategy for future battles.

There’s also the issue of handling multiple enemies. While it’s sensible to expect a tough fight against several opponents, especially when you’re underpowered, the targeting currently falls short of the responsiveness required when a fight is unavoidable. The controls are decent overall, but there really does need to be some serious refinement if Outward is to fulfill its early promise.

Learning to manage the game’s many systems is the biggest potential stumbling block players will face otherwise. If you’re the sort to revel in micromanagement and extreme challenge and enjoy the thrill of actually exploring and living in a place rather than wandering from objective to objective, then Outward could be something special for you from the get-go. It’s a hard sell otherwise, and without a few tweaks (which there’s clearly time for) it may have to be happy with its particular niche crowd.

Then again, perhaps that might be the best way to deliver the purest form of Outward, a flawed, aggressive beast that requires time and patience. It could possibly lose something in being too refined. It makes adventuring into something different and exciting, after all.

Outward preview code provided on PC by the publisher.

Outward is out March 26 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.