In Out and About, the player character visits their grandmother and learns about the real world plants that surround a mountainside town. A natural disaster strikes while they are visiting the grandmother. In the aftermath, players find a lot of fallen trees and hard-to-follow paths and are encouraged to explore and talk to the people in town. Wandering around, players can take pictures of plants and use those pictures to identify them. These plants are based on real plants and teach players to casually learn about the natural flora in their own travels.
Once players have taken a picture of a plant, they get information on what to look for to identify it. That includes details like the petal shape, leaf shape, and stem shape. Players can then tick these off to decide which plant is which. They get information on if it’s safe to eat or use in some way (or if it’s poison). There are also sorting tables in Out and About that function as quiz mechanics, giving players a plant part and multiple choices to identify the plant.
The game heavily focuses on mindful gathering as each plant has a bar at the bottom of the screen. If players harvest too much of a plant, it will stop growing and there will be nothing left for anyone else to pick or for the plant to further grow (such ecosystemic interactions are part of the definition of an ‘ecological game’ by Abraham 2018). Plants can also be used to cook different dishes and create remedies for townsfolk characters.