The cozy camper-van RPG everyone has been quietly waiting on since 2024 finally has a launch stamp on it. Outbound, developed and self-published by Berlin indie team Square Glade Games, went live worldwide on PC and Xbox Series X|S today, May 11, 2026, at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET / 3 PM BST — and it walked straight onto Xbox Game Pass Ultimate as a day-one title. PS5, Switch, and Switch 2 versions ship three days later on May 14.
That staggered window isn't a coincidence. Square Glade quietly moved the PC and Xbox launch earlier in April specifically to clear breathing room from Unknown Worlds' Subnautica 2, which enters early access on those same platforms on the 14th. The PS5 and Switch dates didn't move — there's no Subnautica 2 on PlayStation or Nintendo hardware yet — so the studio just split the launch in two and gave PC and Xbox players the first crack.
The pitch in one sentence
You start with an empty camper van, a stretch of utopian near-future wilderness, and as many friends as you can talk into joining you (up to four in online co-op). The rest is yours to figure out. Source materials from forests, lakes, and abandoned coastal towns. Bolt workstations onto the side of your vehicle. Wire it for solar, wind, or hydro power. Drive somewhere new when the mood strikes, or park up and grow a garden on the roof. There's a story threading through it — a slow, optimistic one about leaving a broken system behind — but the dominant verb is build, not survive.
The Game Pass deal is the headline
Outbound is the kind of niche cozy-survival hybrid that lives or dies on impulse downloads. Putting it on Game Pass Ultimate day one — alongside the recently arrived Descenders Next and ahead of Subnautica 2's own early-access landing on the 14th — is a far better discovery vector than a $24.99 Steam page would have been on its own. Square Glade has confirmed the deal is for the Ultimate tier and includes PC Game Pass, meaning it's on Cloud, Console, and PC simultaneously.
For players outside the Game Pass ecosystem, the game is on sale today on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Square Glade's own storefront. PS5 and Nintendo Switch eShop versions go live May 14.
What's actually in the box
Square Glade has been transparent about scope. The 1.0 release shipping today contains:
- Modular vehicle building — every part of the van can be swapped, extended, or stacked. Roof gardens, solar panels, a smithing forge, a chicken coop — all bolt-on options.
- Sustainable energy systems — three power archetypes (solar, wind, hydroelectric), each with trade-offs depending on biome and weather.
- Online co-op for up to four players — drop-in, drop-out, persistent across saves.
- An open world that's actually open — no fast-travel funnel, no instanced zones. You drive there.
- A narrative spine — Square Glade describes it as "chilled, relaxing," and it is, but there's a reason the world looks the way it does.
The studio behind it
Square Glade Games is a 14-person German indie team that has been showing Outbound at events since 2024 (an alpha trailer dropped in April 2025; a Future Games Show release-date trailer came in March of this year). It's the studio's first commercial title. That makes today the rarest kind of indie launch — a small team self-publishing a self-financed game directly into the most prominent subscription service on console.
Whether Outbound has the legs to compete in a May calendar that already includes Forza Horizon 6, Subnautica 2 on the 14th, and the Forza Horizon 6 Premium Early Access wave on the 15th is the open question. But day-one Game Pass placement is exactly the lifeline a cozy indie of this scale needs. Twelve hours into launch, Square Glade's social channels show Outbound already trending on the Game Pass new-arrivals carousel.
It's live now. Bring a friend.
