Hi, it’s me again with another unlikely goldmine. Let’s go!
You know how you’re not looking, but suddenly you stumble across something that resonates with you? This is the Long Drive. The indie video game made by a couple of dudes. The game that looks like a shitpost, and perhaps it even was planned to be a glorious shitpost, but yet somehow has this something that just makes sense.
Even though I’m writing about it now, I got this game years ago, I think around 2019 or 2020. As I said, I just found it on Steam in recommended, it costed funny money, and the idea to drive made a lot of sense to me even then. Obviously bought it and played for a while. Then I forgot about it for a couple of years, and all of a sudden recently saw it on my list in Steam, and decided to play it again.
So, the Long Drive is the game where you drive. This is ultimate Ryan Gosling simulator. You’re playing as a dude or dudette who gets a letter from their mom who asks them to visit her, and that’s pretty much it, this is the plot. And even this letter is not obligatory for the game to happen, apparently your character doesn’t need many reasons to abandon whatever he or she has, jump in the car and just go on the journey.
The game takes place in the post-apocalyptic world where you’re living in a house in the middle of the fucking nowhere. The only bus stop is empty and judging from the schedule, the bus won’t be coming anytime soon. Besides that, you have your road going nowhere in particular, but you’re not confined by the road, and in fact can go in any direction you want. The game is endless, procedurally generated, and that means that no matter where you’re going, you’re always will stumble across something to do. Not that there’s actually a lot of it to do.
The main thing of this game is the car, obviously. Without the car, you won’t go too far. You start with a random car that ranges from soviet-era jalopies right to retro German cars. There’s a seed generator where apparently you can find the exact car you want to start with, but I never succeeded and was too lazy to look for.
The cars are made pretty decent in this game. I mean, you can literally disassemble them. You can pull the engine out of it, pull the dials, the doors, the sunscreens, the mirrors. While it’s not as precise and detailed like My Summer Car for example, it still gives you enough space for maneuver, especially since while you’re traveling the endless deserts, fields, and whatever there else, you can stumble across other cars and even cannibalize them for your own purposes. And believe me, for the game in very early access, there’s a lot of things you can do to your cars, and even more things to find.
You see, the game has two types of engines: diesel and gasoline. Each engine demands different fuel, obviously. Thankfully radiators take any liquid (I suppose, didn’t try anything besides water), and oil is not required to be engine specific. Also, there’s what I consider semi-third type, it is the one of the old kind of engine that doesn’t require pouring oil into the engine. All you have to do is to make a mixture of oil and gas in the tank. Not a very user-friendly thing, and I avoided it or swapped it almost at once. So, what I mean is that with those engines you have an opportunity to swap engines withing the cars, and I believe there’s really nothing stops you from putting a bigger and heavier engine into lighter car and see what’s about to happen (the worst-case scenario, it won’t work as intended and you won’t drive away). If you’re not putting the engine from the bus, obviously, yet you always can try to attach wheels from the bus. Now that is a real thing, and I remember I did it myself, and it actually reminded me a lot of Mad Max.
And speaking about the busses, yes, there are busses in this game, and you can drive them. In fact, you can drive everything you find. You have motorcycles, you have big rigs, you have tow trucks. There are a lot of different types of vehicles, and you can drive them all, given that you’re able to reanimate them. And also you have trailers to attach to the cars, so basically there’s enough stuff to drive, enough to experiment with, enough to find to your liking. Mine favorite was diesel golf, I don’t remember why exactly, but it just was, and I drove the most on it.
You can also modify your vehicle besides what I said. You can build platforms with the help of iron bars, you can make entire structures a top of your cars to pull all your stuff like barrels with gas, water, and oil, and food, and weapons, and ammo. I saw community hub in Steam, and I must tell you, people got really creative with what they were given. At this moment I understood that I’m probably playing this game wrong, I didn’t build anything on my car, I barely even modified it. I just threw a barrel of diesel I found in one of the tankers on my backseat and just drove without making any stops.
Ah, and since I’ve mentioned stops, and other stuff like water, food, weapons, and ammo, I have to elaborate on other mechanics present in the game. Since we’re playing in the post-apocalyptic world, it is full of dangers, and there are certain survival mechanics present. The world apparently overrun by rabbits from Monty Python, and zombie-cannibals. And both are trying to kill you on sight. Besides that, you also have to watch out for your thirst and hunger meters. That’s where food and water comes into play. Of course, the survival mechanics are there to add some difficulty, but it isn’t very difficult, and if you’re not into it you can turn it off. Both hunger/thirst and enemies. But mind you that this way you’ll turn off at least several things that make the game interesting and more unpredictable than a random boulder on the road.
Besides, the presence of something that’s able to kill you, actually adds a horror element to the game, since when you approach the gas station, or workshop, or church, or something that resembles man-built structure, you never know who you’re going to meet them. It might be an empty, abandoned place. It might be full of human remains, and shit (literally, the game is a shitpost, okay?). Or it might be a bunch of zombies who run at you the second they spot you. They also keep telling you something, so I guess they are less zombie and more cannibals. And believe me, you don’t want them anywhere near yourself since they damage like crazy, and rabbits, at least in earlier stages of the game, one-shot you.
That’s where weapons come into play, and there’re surprisingly a lot of weapons. Starting from Katana, and ending with AK, and revolvers somewhere in between. My favorite is obviously Katana since it doesn’t require any ammo, and it kills everything in one hit, so there’s just no reason to make things complicated. The guns, on the other hand, are fun, and maybe this is the reason to use them.
All in all, the game is a fun little time killer, especially if you’re into procedurally generated worlds where everything is possible, and you love to feel accomplishing something without actually accomplishing anything (the game has no end, so no matter how far you’re going to drive, you’re as close to finish as you were in the beginning). But I believe we need games like that. In the times when everything should be fast, and overstuffed with mechanics, graphics, and cool flashy action scenes, the game where you just drive, fight off rabbits and zombies, and sometimes listen to radio where some mad dude can’t stop ranting about everything and nothing (yes, there’s radio and host is a very interesting person) feels fresh.
Shitpost or not, there is something in this game. Like you’re driving through the endless desert throughout the day, the evening, the night. The road never ends. You make stops to take a break, find food, and gas. And then again, you’re on the road. Moving forward and trying to get somewhere you don’t know even where. That’s perhaps the best depiction of how Mad Max sees the world. The Plains of Silence he’s after are just like the road here – they are never there, yet you keep going, trying to reach. And you don’t even know, maybe you already reached this point hundreds of kilometers ago, but was too focused on what’s ahead of you and missed your destination, and now just go into nowhere until you run out of luck. Yeah, this game has its moments at times, but then you stop at the lonely gas station, find the public toilet full of shit, and sex dolls scattered around, and remember where you’re at. And there’re no Plains of Silence. Just fields of shit, and crazy giant rabbits.
That’s pretty much it. I know that I probably missed a lot, ignored even more, but come on, this is daily entry, and I made no promise it’s going to be as detailed as possible. It’s honest, though. Thank you for reading and see you tomorrow. Bye!