The Long Drive: A surreal road trip that's too weird to put down
It’s 2am, and I’m driving down an empty road in the middle of the desert. The pitch black night stretches out to the horizon, my car’s headlights and the stars providing the only illumination over the barren landscape. Suddenly, my engine dies and the lights cut out, plunging the scene into blackness. An ominous hum approaches from behind, before my dashboard is lit up in bright green by the UFO flying overhead. Panic takes hold. What’s going to happen to me? Out here in the wilderness, nobody would know if I was abducted - or worse.
These are the kind of moments that make The Long Drive just intriguing enough to keep playing. It rarely delivers on said intrigue - the flying saucer in question simply kept floating along the road until it disappeared from view - but Genesz’s game managed to rekindle a feeling that anything could happen. It’s a vibe that harks back to the often strange and confusing world of 1990s gaming.
On the face of it, the title - which has been in Early Access since 2019 - tasks you with driving 5,000km to your mother’s house. It’s a substantial journey, and getting there requires you to stay fed and hydrated, as well as keeping your vehicle in relatively good condition, stocked with petrol, oil, and water.
The road itself follows a randomly generated path through climates ranging from the desert to grassy hills and icy plains. Its path is littered with points of interest - abandoned mansions, diners, gas stations, and so on - that might just provide enough sustenance for you and your car to continue onwards.
However, you are not the only inhabitant of The Long Drive’s vaguely post-apocalyptic world. Giant rabbits roam the countryside and will sometimes attack, and you never know which buildings will be occupied by dead-eyed, zombie-like humanoids. While their AI is dumb, their creepy and distorted voices are enough to trigger a jump scare from a dark corner now and again.
There isn’t much variety to the game. There are long, barren stretches of road and currently only a handful of building plots that can appear. But the drive to keep exploring and make it a little way further, combined with some of the oddities you encounter along the way, have kept me hooked for hours.
The Long Drive is still under development, with several patches pushed during 2024. In its current, barebones state I feel as though my interest will eventually subside, but I’m counting on Genesz to continue adding enough weirdness to the wasteland to fuel exploration for a long time to come.
