History VideoGame / TheOutboundGhost

Following the game's release, legal issues with Digerati caused Conradical Games to disband and then reform as Radhood, whose first project under that name was the thematically similar shoot'em up roguelike ''Soul Stalker''.

''The Outbound Ghost'' is an EasternRPG developed by Conradical Games, released on September 20, 2022. It was funded through a Website/{{Kickstarter}} campaign, which can be viewed [[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/conradicalgames/the-outbound-ghost here]]. The game's official Twitter account is [[https://twitter.com/OutboundGhost here]], and the Youtube channel of the developer (which includes various trailers and gameplay previews) is [[https://www.youtube.com/c/ConradicalGames here]].

* ApocalypseCult: [[spoiler:The Varangians, who have a settlement called Escade to the north of Outbound. In Chapter 4 it's shown that Adrian and Levi ran all the way there while fleeing, and Levi talks about how they knew about ghosts and Figments in life, which led to them committing suicide in order to gain power in death.]] Their members include [[spoiler:the deputy of Ravenside and Levi, which is how Levi's able to cash in a favor and help Adrian avoid the protagonists when they start catching up]].

* BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind: In Chapter 4, [[spoiler:Adrian spots who he thinks is Lee in Escade, and is suddenly pulled into his own mind as he fights a series of battles against his own Figments over whether to confront him]].
* BleakLevel: [[spoiler:Escade is eerily empty and surrounded by fog, with what sounds like a droning noise playing, and no appiritions. The area before it (which [[BackToFront due to the nature of the chapter]] you actually visit afterwards), Deep Toterwald, is a barren area with abandoned wagons and signs warning travellers not to visit Escade, although there are appiritions here.]]

** Levi [[spoiler:was a member of the ApocalypseCult at Escade and, having learned of the power of Figments through it, believes that helping Figment-user Adrian escape from Outbound is the best course of action.]]

* PointOfNoReturn: The game explicitly warns you that "There is no turning back" towards the end, right before [[spoiler:examining Adrian's journal, leading to the fight against Lee and Mary and unlocking Adrian's last Core Memory]].

* WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: Due to Figments being a form of PersonalityPowers, moments of high emotional intensity tend to cause vivid hallucinations, such as [[spoiler:Mary seeing Linda turn into a Trust Figment]] and [[spoiler:Adrian seeing Lee and Mary turn into "You" Figments when first meeting the former]].

* FightingYourFriend: Chapter 2 [[spoiler:starts with Mary fighting an apparition in the form of the original protagonist, and midway has Mary hallucinate that Linda's become a violent Figment]]. Chapter 3 [[spoiler:has the original protagonist hallucinate that all of the random encounters are against Mary and Michael after the latter two ascend, and ends with him forced to fight Adrian in his mind just as Adrian makes amends]], and Chapter 4 [[spoiler:ends with Adrian hallucinating that Lee and Mary are violent Figments]].

* WholePlotReference: The BackToFront segment is explicitly compared by [[spoiler:Adrian]] to [[Film/{{Memento}} a movie he doesn't outright namedrop]].

* BleakLevel: [[spoiler: Escade is eerily empty and surrounded by fog, with what sounds like a droning noise playing, and no appiritions. The area before it (which [[BackToFront due to the nature of the chapter]] you actually visit afterwards), Deep Toterwald, is a barren area with abandoned wagons and signs warning travellers not to visit Escade, although there are appiritions here.]]

* PoorCommunicationKills: One of the first things the AmnesiacHero is asked to do in Outbound is meet with another ghost named Adrian, who's also suffering amnesia. However, the initial meeting goes awry, and rather than sort things out, Adrian panics and spends entire chapters of the game trying to run as far from the protagonists as possible and set up various traps behind him.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: Various elements of the game's difficulty can be freely adjusted in the menu without penalty, from how challenging the enemies are to the encounter rate and how much experience is gained from battle.

* BubblegloopSwamp: The Soggy Swamp, where the initial progatonist and Shirley fall into after [[spoiler:Adrien throws them off a cliff]]. [[spoiler:While the water isn't dangerous to them as ghosts, it poisoned Outbound's living residents, and was what lead to the killings happening in the first place]].

* BubblegoopSwamp: The Soggy Swamp, where the initial progatonist and Shirley fall into after [[spoiler:Adrien throws them off a cliff]]. [[spoiler:While the water isn't dangerous to them as ghosts, it poisoned Outbound's living residents, and was what lead to the killings happening in the first place]].

* LeftHanging: [[spoiler:Chapter 3 ends with Lee, Linda, and Adrian deciding to finally work together to understand the secrets behind Figments, only for Chapter 4 to be a WholeEpisodeFlashback combined with OnceMoreWithClarity as Adrian figures out the DrivingQuestion. As Chapter 5 is PostEndGameContent, the situation at the end of Chapter 3 is never actually resolved, and the mysteries behind the Figments left unsolved.]]

* SilentProtagonist: The ghost that the player names at the start of the game doesn't have any dialogue boxes while under the player's control. [[spoiler:Once the player switches to [[AndNowForSomeoneCompletelyDifferent controlling someone else]], he's perfectly capable of speaking, with the OnceMoreWithClarity segments even showing what he actually was saying while under the player's control.]]

* BackToFront: The entirety of [[spoiler:Chapter 4. It's a series of segments from Adrian's perspective as he relives them and overcomes his short-term memory loss. It starts from what he was doing right before the end of Chapter 3, then shows what he was doing right before ''that'' segment started, and repeats until the final scene shows what he was doing before the game's opening]].

** The main protagonist [[spoiler:abandoned his family after the rest of Outbound treated him like an outsider, occasionally sending letters back home but only deciding to return after learning their lives were in danger]].