Escapism, Digital Exploitation and Godhood in David Moralejo Sánchez’s Outpath (2023)
Indietail #1
The 16th October 2023 saw the quiet release of a little indie game by the name of “Outpath” on Steam. Created by lone developer David Moralejo Sánchez and published by GrabTheGames and UpgradePoint, the game follows an invisible first person protagonist, without a name, who awakens on a small, cuboid island, with the ocean flanking them on all sides. This peculiar and castaway prison would seem daunting in any other scenario, but the whole place feels somehow peaceful from the moment the player loads up the game. You cannot drown, and are allowed to swim in the boundless, teal-blue nothingness.
Part 1: Expand, Exploit, Conquer
Around you, on your personal little geometric hodgepodge, you will find resources: wood, grass, sand and stone. Some things never change, and your instincts, borrowed from other survival titles of yore, Mojang’s Minecraft chief among them, compel you to click on these pixel art reservoirs. After a few clicks, any clump of rock, strand of grass, grain of sand or even burlesquing tree crumbles under your pressure. Now you may craft your first workbench, the first of dozens of crafting stations throughout Outpath. Resources always respawn after a few seconds, so your exploitation of this digital environment is boundless and, over time, the trees, rocks, sand, seaweed and the many other resources of Outpath’s about 25–30 hour experience begin to mesh into this one singular category of “resource”.
You start Outpath in an environment, and end it in a multi-island factory, where every strip of land is shaved of everything it has, and any time a new geode, patch of grass or even a massive tree appears, it is swiftly ripped from the minimalist, jagged outcrop of land it grew from. Animals do not get this same grace period, as they become sources of meat and dairy as soon as they spawn in on your first island.
While the above paragraph bears a dour note of melancholy within it, the actual demeanor of the world remains as vibrant, cheery and violent-free as can be. The music tracks throughout the game are relaxing and beautiful, in an ethereal or intangible sort of way — often blending into the background and putting the player in a meditative trance. The whole experience indulges in the aesthetics of a faraway dream, where the lack of consequences is a foregone conclusion. The dissonance between these feelings and your actions never connects, lest you overthink what you’re doing. Cute turtles run around the beaches, bovine and chickens, with their static, 2D sprites frolic — somewhat sterilely — in your minimalist island utopia, which soon becomes a whole expanse, an archipelago of promise and new biomes with resources aplenty to pilfer. The feeling of a “factory” is not one present upfront, it’s a feeling that encroaches slowly upon you, the more time you spend in this mysterious land.
Crafting stations abound, as does automation, and it doesn’t take long till biomes no longer even need to be looked at, explored and perused, in order to be skinned of their valuables. The game has an unlockable photo mode, and I was shocked when, upon taking a picture during the game’s beginning, which was horribly amateurish, I compared it to my attempts at more polished renditions of my base during the endgame, realizing that no matter the angle I pointed the (admittedly finicky) camera, the island simply never looked nice; my cramped, almost cubical-like workspace — built as such, to capitalize on Outpath’s crafting station synergy mechanics, where placing one crafting station close enough to another adds new, exclusive recipes to both — was choking the landscape. No matter how bright the textures, there was an undeniable feeling of having done something deeply wrong to this land.
Over time you will unlock the ability to construct a base, and even build bridges between biomes and islands. Each new island that you expand to features skill books, which when punched enough times emit a satisfying chime and unlock their accompanying skill, sometimes single level improvements in efficiency, such as being able to hold down the left mouse button instead of having to constantly click on your resources (an option available from the start in the accessibility menu, for those who need or want it early). Other times these abilities can be upgraded, to grant ever increasing bonuses, such as additional damage and critical hit percentages to creatures and resources.
You will unlock many biomes, and never will there be any true opposition to it in the game. You don’t have a health bar, the game’s creatures cannot retaliate against their slaughter, and are generally amiable before and throughout the process. The cutesy veneer here belies the fact that everything is uniform: a tree, rock, cow and chicken are all one and the same, because all are harvested with a few simple clicks of the left mouse button, and later by simply holding it down. The only time the game draws a distinction between the two types of harvest, is within the skills menu, with separate skills granting you additional damage to creatures and resources, but even this division doesn’t change the fact of both skills simply being boosts of efficiency — streamlining of the slaughter and ceaseless excavation. You’re not here for these plants, this soil or these creatures, instead, you’re here to reduce the time of their perpetual devastation for your own means, while increasing the spoils gained.
The game’s biomes become more and more fantastical. Your starting point, the Grasslands, is about as unassuming as its name: rocks, trees, sand, grass, flowers, wildlife and insects, such as butterflies and earthworms — populate this serene, but dull landscape. The next biome, Amberpath, features (as the name may suggest) geodes of Amber, larger, sharp, auburn-tipped trees, wheat and larger flowers, along with sentient blue slimes, that drop their slime — or “drool”, as the game calls it — upon defeat. The third biome is a desert with crabs, gold, shells of various kinds, sand beetles and gilded “Worms of the Sands”.
The three last biomes, however, are where the game ramps up its fantastical nature. The “Unseen” is a mystical, blue-tinged forest, with sentient spriggan-looking creatures, which drop “magic branches” upon defeat, along with large and fast blue beetles, that are able to be caught in a bug net and used as bait for fishing, or in various crafting recipes. Where previous biomes featured minerals increasing in quality, but keeping ties to the real world, those being copper, iron and gold (in that order), the Unseen introduces “Luslite” to the mix, a strange, green ore, that needs various kinds of vegetation, like flowers and fiber, along with coal, to be able to be transformed into ingots. The White Peaks feature rabbits and another new, fictional ore: Octanite, which can be both frozen and charged with electricity, to create frozen and charged Octanite respectively. The last biome – the floating islands simply called “Sky”, are fully mystical: fallen star fragments, dark energy, floating cloud sprites, actual cloud particles, “Heavenwood” and odd, colorful mushrooms exist among throngs of rainbow-colored butterflies and pigs. The pigs come in two variants: winged and earthbound.
It feels like you’re going further down a rabbit hole, further into a fantasy of a world, a minimalist simulation or caricature – or perhaps, as we’ll see in the next sections: venturing deeper into escapism.
Part 2: Letters
Around the end of your expedition and eventual mastery of the game’s first biome and its procedurally generated set of islands, you will be given the option to craft a mailbox, a cheap little structure, which fundamentally changes the course of Outpath. Upon constructing this rudimentary, white repository, you immediately receive your first piece of mail, ostensibly out of nowhere. The message from beyond reads:
“Your new life begins here; try not to overthink it, and everything will go smoother.”
The source-less voice from beyond grants you an open invitation to do as you wish, to master the environment to engage in play, as you would with any other game. In short: the world is your oyster.
The letters become more and more esoteric and the numbering on them does not match the numbers the letters have in your inventory. Letter 2, actually designated as “Letter #0” in the player’s inventory, reads as follows:
“You’re only aware of yourself. People became faceless, but at least you made it; you won’t suffer anymore.”
This letter feels more underhanded in its messaging than the last, and more snide, as well. Indeed, you’re alone on these islands, “people” (if there ever were any here to begin with) have become “faceless”. You are on an island, and have simultaneously become an island yourself, stationed on your lonely, rectangular archipelago, all on your lonesome, toiling the days away, becoming a master over digital reality. You feel ethereal, displaced from the moment you launch the game, untethered from this world and the consequences of your actions. Are you, saddled atop your office chair, in front of your computer, also engaging in the ritual of facelessness? Perhaps.
“I think you’re pushing yourself too hard; perhaps it’s time to meet up with friends or family before it’s too late.”
Is what next letter reads, demarcated as “Letter 7” in your inventory. Chillingly, the game seems to be — rather directly — engaging in a dialogue with the player. It almost feels like the game itself is inviting you to a new ritual: this time, one of not playing — of abstinence. The author seems to actively plead for you to get up from your chair, abandon your pursuit of resources and ever higher numbers of them; to forfeit your mastery — even if just for a moment — to interface with your loved ones, whose time on this planet remains ever uncertain.
The farther and farther you get in the game, the more letters you receive. Every time a new biome unlocks or you complete some major milestone. The next one speaks to you yet again:
“How did you end up here? You have everything, and yet, you still want to lose it?”
The contents of these letter seem to be turning more direct, more aggressive, maybe even more hostile in their appeal to the reader. The letter asks the question on the mind of possibly every player, left hitherto unanswered: “How did you end up here?” As you grapple with the contents of this message, and try to find some explanation, you realize the answer was staring you right in the face: you turned on the game. The only reason you’re here. The only reason these numbers exist, is because you ran an executable, you kickstarted the algorithm to make them manifest on your screen. You are the creator and conqueror of this archipelago. You bring expansion and conquest to this place, as has happened countless times before, in our real, shared history — and with you, in other digital universes. You aren’t on a road in Oupath, you are the driver, the car and the road, in their holistic simultaneity.
Letter 5 or “#0 II” begs the following questions:
“You’ve made significant progress these days. Do you finally understand why you’re doing this? Once it’s over, you know it won’t matter anymore, right? Will you wait for me? Or will you drown me?”
The game comments on your progress, but questions your understanding of its purpose. Upon your odyssey’s completion, the game itself humors the idea, that it won’t matter anymore; your island, your credit balance and the resources on your save, will be nothing more than data on a hard drive, or in a cloud. The last two questions of the letter seem to be addressing a different stratum of the reality surrounding the game, the dialogue is now less directly about the player, but about the player’s relation to a mysterious second “me”. The gestalt of its writing seems to point both to the game, and to real world work, mayhap climbing the many rungs of the social ladder. The second person asks whether, in our ascension up these rungs, we will wait for them, or rather climb over them, in order to reach higher?
Letter 6, also known as “Letter #1 II”, narrows the understanding of the metanarrative:
“You thought you were aiming for everything, and it turns out ‘everything’ was just money. It’s your downfall and, unfortunately, I believe it always will be. But if you’re reading this, it means I did my research and work well. We’re so easily manipulated; it’s quite frightening.”
You are now being actively antagonized by the writer. The downfall of the player character seems to be money, likely in the real life of the recipient. You are greedy, the exploitation of your main character become naturally juxtaposed to your actions inside of the game world: your deflowering of any environment you stumble into, is not singularly confined to the digital world, it seems.
Part 3: Ascend, Fall, Wake
Letter 7, marked “Letter 9” in-game, simply states:
“You did it. Thanks for everything. Truly.”
You receive this penultimate letter after completing the game and it is impossible not to see it as possibly sarcastic in its delivery. Perhaps you are both being thanked for winning the game, but also being dismissed and let go by the writer of the letter: “Thanks for everything. Truly.” could be a genuine send off to the player, while also being an exasperated, laconic announcement of the writer leaving the player character’s life.
With this, it is perhaps fitting that the game ends in a floating island biome, above the clouds, with fantastical beings and resources. In here, you craft an item simply called “The Circle”, its item description compelling you to “sleep till dusk”. Upon entering your in-game bed, shortly thereafter, the screen turns black — end scene — as slowly scrolling, white letters spell out:
“That’s it.”
A few seconds after:
“It was time to wake up.”
Before the credits roll slowly, adorned with that same plain white text font. You came full circle, not just at the end, but every day, like clockwork, like a routine, like a job: you slept, you woke up, you ate, you worked and you slept and woke up — over and over again.
Your escapism is over, you can leave now, though the game still allows you to play, and, somewhat randomly, one last letter awaits you under the sky island, floating serenely on the ocean below. This letter, the eighth and final one, designated as “Letter #-” and looking tattered and torn in your inventory, concludes:
“Thank you for all the love you were able to give me. During those years, I was happy and didn’t even know it. Now you’re all around the world; it’s the least I could do for you. Thank you.”
Time has passed – maybe even passed the protagonist by – and this is his final, bittersweet attempt at reaching out, a simple thank you letter, a thank you for all the times the protagonist didn’t know how good they had it. They can only give a little, wistful “thank you”, lost under the overshadowing sky, adrift in the middle of an ocean. They have all moved away, everyone he loved scattered, like Outpath’s islands.
In the end, you may have mastered the flora and fauna, may have overcome the complexities of machinery and made commerce and bleeding every corner of everything in Outpath dry into an art form, but, at the end of it all, you are only left with empty islands and completing the game’s final achievement: getting your credits up to the integer limit, makes your credit counter disappear entirely, as well, leaving you with nothing. The words of letter 5 begin ringing in your ears:
“Once it’s over, you know it won’t matter anymore, right?”
Indeed, it didn’t, but at least you enjoyed it — hopefully, that is. It is my hope, dear reader, addressing you directly now, as did the game’s author through these letters: I pray you have somewhere to return, after the shutters of the credits close on Outpath’s world. Ascension, godhood, escape and mastery over something may be meaningful and fun in their own right, but be careful, lest their promise leaves you broken. Don’t let the cataracts of escapism and greed block out all semblance of the light you hold for your loved ones, and that they hold for you. And finally, please, try your best to leave the world better than when you came in.
To conclude this analysis, I’d like to copy an excerpt from my own review of Outpath on Steam: Outpath is a procedural canvas, ripe for exploitation, and reflections on what it means to exploit, to build, to climb higher and to simply be.
