With the explosion of incremental games, we’re starting to see the incremental game design structure pour out into other genres. Outhold is a tower defence game first and foremost, but its entire structure is built around a large spideweb of upgrades and tower choices. It is a fun game to play, for the most part, but it also leaves me questioning whether incrementalism is fundamentally dragging out a gameplay loop that would be more satisfying if it were skill-dependent up front.
Outhold has 10 levels and 50 challenges to try and conquer across them, with a new game plus styled challenge afterwards. Its minimalist design means that geometric shapes will roam the paths of the map towards a goal that the player needs to defend. If the goal is attacked, it’ll lose health, and if the health runs out, it’s game over for that run. You’ll have designated tower placements along the path, which allows you to place any tower you’ve unlocked so far. You’ll need cash to buy towers, and then upgrade them if you want. There is also a cool unlockable attack that turns your cash into bullets for a coin gun, which is aimed and controlled by the player. There’s even the ability to unlock elemental traits for towers, which add slow, poison, or burn damage to enemies. Most of these aren’t available early on because Outhold’s skill tree requires time investment.
A better example is that your basic arrow tower can be unlocked into a lightning tower. In future level completions, you have the choice of improving the chain rate of lightning strikes, adding two arrows to the original tower, or turning the arrow tower into a long-range balista-like “heavy arrow” tower. If you decide on all of those, it’s likely you won’t be able to buy the slow tower, the fire tower, the coin shooter, or some of the health or economy upgrades. Choices, choices, choices. It’s the best part of the game for the first 4 hours.
The enemy waves and initial fire rate, range, and damage of your basic towers are designed to be very ineffective early on. You cannot strategise your way to success with Outhold. Instead, you’ve got to grind for currency. The massive upgrade tree can have up to 10 upgrades per node for damage, firerate, or other tricks, and you’ll need to decide where to spend your money. The 50 different missions include surviving the map and its insta-death boss, beating a time trial mode, performing a certain action or dealing damage a certain way, and then later on limiting how much upgrade currency you’ve spent as a hard challenge. Each different type of mission unlocks a bespoke currency, and these are powerful, as they are tied to either unlocking new skills, towers, or special variations. Clearing a level lets you unlock the fire tower, but the time trial and special skill missions will unlock increased burn rates or layering slow onto the damage, too. The key strategy here is deciding which loadouts you want to pursue because for the first 8 hours of the game, you won’t be allowed to unlock everything. I like that Outhold lets you build 5 loadouts, and you can switch between them to try out different styles of gameplay.
By the time I’d finished the main campaign and seen the end credits, the fun had turned into something more jaded. Failure is so baked into Outhold’s design that I felt my decisions for upgrades or tower placement didn’t matter nearly as much as the best tower defence games in the genre emphasised it did. The grind was getting thin towards the end of the game because there are only 10 maps and limited options. Once you hit the post-credits game, that’s where the true strategy comes into play. Challenges limit the amount of upgrade cash you can spend, and suddenly, Outhold feels like a meaningful strategic game. I just wish I wasn’t forced to play the game for 8 hours to get to the good stuff. The post-credits game is brutal and tricky to get perfect outcomes on, whilst you could grind yourself into accidental wins beforehand. Is this good game design? I’m not entirely sure, but I felt like Outhold was too focused on failure across not enough maps and options, and it made progression feel stale.
If you don’t care about failure and incrementalism being baked hard into the design and progression of a game, then bump my score up 1 or 2 points. Outhold has plenty of strategic fun to be had; it’s just that you have to grind to experience the true gem hidden within. The skill tree is flexible and allows players to build different tower sets and invest in upgrades, but you can always grind yourself back into a winning formula eventually. I personally prefer my incremental structures to be a little less restrictive, and that’s reflected in the final review score.
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