Traditional roguelike gets infused with narrative storytelling and driving with Heading Out.
You know how everyone’s up to being into what is popular nowadays. A few years ago it was battle-royale mode, where everyone was just taking their own spin on the subgenre and nowadays, the roguelike has taken over most of the marketplaces of PC and console platforms. From the smallest indie developers to known companies, there is a shift to the roguelike genre, and it seems like there is no end in sight.
Roguelike, in terms of gameplay, follows a non-linear path on the players’ adventure, meaning people can choose their own faith and opt to make decisions meanwhile trying to reach their goal. This adds replay value and a mix of customization when it comes to building up your character. Roguelike is mostly used as action games and they are mostly paired with top-down shooters with bullet hell elements. However, there are some outliers who get out of their way and make it a unique experience, such as Heading Out.
When I first saw the game, I thought this was a rather simplistic driving title. From the images, it does really look like so, but digging deeper into the gameplay- and mostly looking at the Steam page- the mention of roguelike caught my attention. Action and shooters are the most popular, how come a driving game can be considered a roguelike anyway? Well, I got my answer as soon as I booted up the game and experienced it first-hand.
Heading Out is a narrative adventure with roguelike elements with driving sections spread throughout your adventure to bring down the best driver in the US. What I liked is how the game lets you choose your past story, touching upon topics like relationships, capitalism, civil war, and most prominent out of all, running from fears. Although the subplot of fear is a bit too much, it adds a flavor and rush to Heading Out’s story, which I’ll talk about it soon.
After choosing our name, our past story, and our vehicle of desire, we get to run away from our fear. It is not exactly explained why and who’s following us, but what we know is running away from it instead of driving towards and facing them. Once we finish the beginning and learn how to commandeer our vehicle, we get thrown into the map where we get to make our crucial decisions. These tend to be more about which roads to take, managing your focus, handling the car’s condition, and fuel management.
Each road we take has a set of events that we can enter. These can range from races to small road tidbits where we can, again, choose the better option for us. While it is easy for the player to stall their adventures for a while, it is important to note that fear is still chasing them, and it is better to just keep moving- unless it is an event with a good payout and you can spare some of your time to help others in need.
Since Heading Out takes place in the late 60s and early 70s USA, there are a lot of cultural approaches to the background of the settings we are racing through. Let it be cars, politics, heavy usage of radio, and the loneliness of the interstate roads. Although it could have been portrayed with well-designed, long drives, Heading Out has small segments of gameplay, around four to six minutes of driving time.
As mentioned earlier, Heading Out’s biggest component to push its personality is the ever-so-living radio stations. Radios always either host a talk show about America’s current situation with an ongoing civil war in the north while sorting themselves out or include music radios that air rock to country music. In each segment of the gameplay, you are tasked to hold one opponent off until the music ends, which is indicated on the top left of the screen. Again, these last quite a short amount of time, so you are constantly going between the roadmap and the gameplay that is driving.
I have mentioned driving quite a lot, but how does the driving feel exactly? Since, you know, it is the only way of running from fears and reaching that said racer. I have played quite a lot of both arcade and sim racers, and all I can describe Heading Out’s driving style is just “floaty”. I think this was deliberately chosen as the car you are driving is a late 60s Dodge Challenger- at least that’s what I assume developers have inspired from.
Muscle cars from that era are known to handle like boats and barely have any top speed, therefore it is portrayed as it is intended. It is good that they have chosen this way, but the driving is implemented, I wouldn’t say half-assed, but rather uncontrollable. Breaking does barely anything and even with a slight touch to breaks, you might just start sliding. Now, on an open road with traffic, the vehicle is okay to control, but once the traffic becomes a part of your concern, then controlling the car gets a bit tedious.
In terms of controls, Heading Out just plays like any other driving game. Acceleration, brakes, and steering are the main controls you should be aware of, but the game also lets you manually change gears, which is a great addition in my opinion. I have played Gran Turismo and Forza for a very long time, and I always chose the manual shifting to have a better handle of the vehicle I am driving. Though it is nice to have, Heading Out doesn’t have a redline at the speedometer, which is confusing because you do not know when to shift up or down.
Visually, Heading Out employs a monochromic paint palette, with only blacks and whites. There are some hints of red and yellow too, but those are used to represent some key elements. Yellow is for the road signs, as you can find them to be useful while running away from cops or racing against your opponents. These signs can be interpreted as turns or sometimes detours, which can help you leap forward a hefty chunk. Red, on the other hand, represents fear. Red is also known to represent danger in real life, so whenever you see red, prepare to get onto the throttle.
And let’s not forget the sound design. Heading Out has a background theme where it relies on the soundtrack alone. Since our protagonist is always on the road with a hefty bound on his head, he must listen to the radio to keep up with the updates about him and around him, therefore keeping the radio on is a must. Alongside the updates and talk shows about him, we can hear heavy rock and country music, which portrays the American culture of the 70s pretty much spot on. Not to mention that the details of the engine roaring alongside environmental sounds like traffic and crashes also sound realistic.
There are some in-game mechanics that allow you to get away from some sticky situations, and that is solely based upon your reputation stat. Each action you take and the decision you make has a consequence that either gives you reputation- or fame- or removes reputation. It comes in handy as things get tougher since the radio hosts start talking about your legendary run, and people start to support your move to being a bandit as trust in the government is constantly sinking to the bottom with their poor choices.
Heading Out is a never-ending game. What I mean by that is, that you could end up failing in the first run due to your small knowledge of the mechanics. Once the game is over, the fear that is chasing you decides to let you go for another try. And another one, and another one, and you guessed it, another one. The title really is built on the roguelike theme, where you can choose different roads in each of your playthroughs, giving it more of a choose-your-own-adventure vibe rather than a linear game with strict rules. You own the road and you need to overcome the obstacles both government and fear put in front of you.
Although well-crafted, Heading Out had some problems that presented themselves during the driving. In one of the first playthroughs, a car merged with the car that was inside to change lanes, which was also occupied by another car, leaving me no choice but to crash into it. Certain driving missions tended to be rather easy to beat too, despite being in the normal difficulty. The hardest difficulty could be a potential challenge, but considering normal was barely any hard, I do not really think the hardest could be any different- unless the developers decide to update the game of course.
Heading Out is one of the titles that put a unique perspective on the roguelike genre. Sure, the whole having-an-adventure-each-run theme has been done many, many times before. But this time around, the main theme revolves around the struggles of the protagonist on the way to resolving his problems in the past. While the other roguelikes focus on the gaming aspect too much, Heading Out mainly focuses on the story and possibilities of becoming a notorious bandit while trying to find your true inner self, which is different from many other hybrid games that try to mix roguelikes and story-based gameplay into one coherent game.
With its endless possibilities of different runs and expansive lore, Heading Out is worthy of your try. The game might be just hard to grasp right out of the gate, but since it gives the player a lot of chances to redeem themselves, getting used to Heading Out takes a bit of time and that is completely fine. While it might not fulfill your needs for an action-packed roguelike game, the narrative aspects of it will surely deliver some quality time. Definitely worthy of a checkout if you are a fan of both roguelikes and driving games.
