Overview
The Outbound soundtrack is an original score written by composer Tyler Zane, who previously scored Square Glade Games' earlier title Above Snakes. The music is built to match the game's warm, mellow, solarpunk tone and sits at the heart of the cozy van life fantasy that defines the project. It plays underneath long drives, quiet campsites, and peaceful mornings, tying together the game's art style and aesthetic with its hopeful sustainability theme.
The soundtrack will be available as a separate Steam DLC at launch on April 23, 2026, and it also ships as a digital voucher inside both of the game's physical editions. An Expanded Soundtrack was unlocked during the Kickstarter campaign as a stretch goal, meaning backers and buyers receive extra material beyond the base score.
Tyler Zane
Tyler Zane is an independent composer who writes atmospheric music for indie games and films. He runs his practice out of tylerzanemusic.com and lists collaborations with a broad range of developers on his portfolio, with indie game scoring as a central focus of his career. Publicly available biographical detail about him beyond that is limited, so this article sticks to work that can be directly linked to released projects.
His most visible prior credit with Square Glade Games is the Above Snakes Original Soundtrack, released on Steam on May 25, 2023 as paid DLC for the studio's debut game. The Above Snakes OST is credited entirely to Tyler Zane, who also mastered the release. That 2023 score established the working relationship that carried over into Outbound.
Musical Style and Influences
The score leans into a warm, mellow, acoustic sound that fits the game's solarpunk setting and its relaxed pacing. Square Glade has repeatedly described the overall tone of Outbound as drawing from the same feeling as Chobani's "Dear Alice" animated short, a piece of commercial work that has become shorthand for a whole wave of hopeful, hand-crafted, nature-forward visual storytelling. The music is written to match that Dear Alice inspiration rather than push against it.
Across gameplay footage and trailers the score sits in a soft, melodic register. It is never jarring or percussive in the way a combat score would be, and there is no urgency baked into the palette. Instead the music is built to hum under the player's decisions, letting players focus on driving, foraging, gardening, or tidying up their camper van without being pulled out of the moment.
Expanded Soundtrack Stretch Goal
During the Outbound Kickstarter, Square Glade added an Expanded Soundtrack as one of the project's stretch goals. The studio unlocked every stretch goal they announced during the campaign, which included additions like a companion, the camping system, and this expanded music package. The practical outcome is that the shipped soundtrack contains more material than it would have if the campaign had stopped at its base funding target.
Square Glade has not publicly published a complete final tracklist ahead of launch, so exact track counts and run times are best confirmed at release through the Steam DLC page. The Expanded Soundtrack label is the studio's own framing and is used to distinguish the post-stretch-goal version of the score from whatever smaller in-game selection players would have received without backer support.
Digital Soundtrack DLC
The soundtrack is sold as a standalone Steam DLC attached to the main Outbound store page. Buying it gives players direct access to the audio files through Steam's built-in soundtrack delivery system, which on modern Steam installations can be streamed or copied out to a local music library. The DLC is positioned as an add-on for listeners who want to keep the score on hand outside of play sessions, not as a gate on anything in the game itself. The in-game score plays for every player regardless of whether they own the DLC.
Because the soundtrack sits in its own DLC slot, players on Steam who already own the base game can add it to their library separately at any point after release. It is expected to appear in the same Q2 2026 window as the game itself.
Included in Physical Editions
Both of the game's physical editions come with the Digital Soundtrack as a voucher in the box. Buyers of the Standard Physical Edition receive a code that unlocks the soundtrack alongside the School Bus Adventures DLC, and the Collector's Edition also includes the soundtrack voucher as part of its package. That keeps the physical product feature-complete for fans who want the music without having to buy it as a separate Steam add-on.
The voucher is redeemed through whichever storefront matches the physical SKU. See the platforms and release article for a full platform list.
Tracks
Square Glade has not published a definitive pre-launch tracklist. A confirmed tracklist is expected to appear on the Steam soundtrack DLC page on or near the April 23, 2026 release date, and this section will be updated at that point once it is available from the publisher.
For reference, the Above Snakes Original Soundtrack released on Steam in 2023 included 12 tracks composed by Tyler Zane. The Outbound score is expected to be larger thanks to the Expanded Soundtrack stretch goal, but the exact number of tracks has not been disclosed.
How Music Adapts to Gameplay
Outbound is a quiet, systemic game, so its music is layered to suit what the player is doing rather than sit as a single looping track. Listeners in trailers and demo footage can pick out distinct moods for exploration, driving, and camping. Upbeat road music supports long journeys across open terrain, softer ambient pieces cover evenings at camp, and lighter cues back everyday tasks like gardening or organising the van interior.
The score also shifts with the game's biomes. The Outdoors and The Coast each carry their own musical identity, with the coastal biome leaning into lighter, airier tones while forested and rural areas sit in earthier, more grounded textures. Square Glade has not published a biome-by-biome breakdown of exactly how many cues are swapped in each area, so players will hear the full mapping for the first time at launch.
Time of day and weather also factor in. The game's weather and day-night cycle changes the visual palette from bright, sunlit fields to rainy afternoons and quiet nights, and the score tracks those shifts with gentler, more intimate arrangements after dark and during rainfall. The end result is that the soundtrack feels less like a fixed album and more like a slow, rolling companion to the player's own pace through the world.
Above Snakes Connection
Tyler Zane's work on Above Snakes is the clearest reference point for what the Outbound score sounds like, since the two projects share the same composer and the same studio. Above Snakes is a tile-based Western survival game, so its music skews more dusty and folk-tinged than Outbound's warmer solarpunk palette, but the underlying sensibility carries over: gentle melodies, a lot of acoustic instrumentation, and an unhurried approach to pacing.
Players who enjoyed Above Snakes' score can safely expect Outbound's music to feel like a continuation of that identity, tuned for a very different setting. The carryover is also part of why Square Glade has publicly framed Outbound as the spiritual successor to their earlier work in terms of atmosphere, even though the two games differ sharply in genre and visuals. For more on the studio's evolution between the two projects, see the development history article.
Players who want to hear the music ahead of launch can sample it inside the free demo available on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The demo runs through a short vertical slice of early gameplay with representative tracks from the score, although not every piece in the full release is included in that build.