Desolate Roads is a short horror game in which you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Now you need to search the desolate roads for something that can help.
It’s structured like a standard survival horror puzzle – down one path you find a chained up gate, down another path you find bolt-cutters that you can’t take yet because they’re stuck in a rusted vise, and so on.
As you explore, you get text messages that slowly shed light on the surrounding events. At other points, fiery phantasms materialize and chase you, with your only recourse being to banish them with the help of the radios in nearby cars.
These are all neat ideas, but unfortunately it ends up feeling tedious instead of scary.
Desolate Roads is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and there are no save points. You really only need a handful of items, which would make it even shorter, so it makes up for this by having it set in a large area that requires a lot of walking to reach any specific spot. These key areas are easy enough to find, being at the end of clear paths, but they require you to spend a lot of time slowly walking to reach them.
That’s probably intentional to build up the atmosphere, but since enemy encounters are scripted, you spend most of the time without anything happening.
Now, my first playthrough resulted in an early death, because I walked in the opposite direction at the start of the game and simply died. On my second playthrough, I went in the right direction and started paying attention to which items were where and figuring out what I’d need to do. I missed the first item, so nothing happened at all as I explored each path, but once I figured out what I’d missed, I was right on track to complete the rest – except the radio mechanic glitched out, so I had no way to survive the first enemy encounter.
By my third playthrough, I more or less knew exactly what item to use where, but I was so tired of trudging down those same roads with nothing happening that the monsters only filled me with the dread that if I failed, I’d have to do this all over again.
As you can see, my specific experience with the game colored my impressions. If I hadn’t spent so much time on my second playthrough only to run into a glitch and need to start over, I might have enjoyed it more. It does have some neat ideas, and the core gameplay isn’t bad.
But there’s just too much time spent on those desolate roads, and the atmosphere isn’t strong enough to keep the tension high.
