Runaways and vagabonds are back in action! But this time, no hitchhiking, androids, or stuffed monkeys! Just you, your faithful iron horse, and your favorite song on the radio. Existential horror is on our heels, but there are thousands of American roads ahead and the best race of your life. On the gas! This time everything will definitely work out!
A project like Heading Out, with the aesthetics of classic road trip and Frank Miller comics, couldn’t help but attract my attention. A combination of genres from a visual novel, arcade racing and a roguelike game – these are literally the genres I’m writing about here! There’s even an immersiveness here. Of course, it all works very ambiguously together. We’ll figure out exactly how.
The Horned Hare
a.k.a. Jackalope. That’s the name of the main character. Rather, it is a nickname that the media and the honest people of the United States will give him. He is an illegal racer who is going to have the greatest race with the legendary ghost rider. No, not that one, although the devil knows. And you can’t stop for more than a minute, because existential horror devours the idle on American highways.
Sometimes the horror overtakes
The main plot is sketched in such broad strokes. At the beginning of the game, we need to give ourselves a name and answer a couple of personal questions: your best day, your worst nightmare, everything like that. Looking ahead, it doesn’t affect the story too much.
And the story of Heading Out consists of hundreds of small events that we will encounter on the road. Their order is random, because we have a bagel here. I’m not sure if this is better than a well-written fixed story, but it works very well for the feeling of travel.
Everything is at stake!
Screenshots are not what they seem. The main part of the game takes place on a map of American roads. All events are highlighted here: random meetings, races where you can and should earn money. We have two necessary parameters: focus, so as not to sleep at the wheel, and the condition of the car. The money is immediately converted into gasoline in cities, where you can buy all the necessary supplies such as coffee, cigarettes, a fresh newspaper (this is all for focusing), as well as screwdrivers and sticky tape for emergency car repairs. Yes, the level of immersion in the automotive theme is at this level.
May he not die at the end of the broadcast!
The other important parameters are fame and reputation, which is also karma. They are earned and spent on random meetings. It’s like in an RPG: good karma gives bonuses to a good guy and vice versa.
The main resource is time. Fear is palpably on their heels, turning the roads painfully red. Although this is not a direct allegory of illness, it is precisely such associations that this creeping death evokes. What exactly is this fear? Either this is an abstraction, or a completely tangible wendigo. All the answers are correct, and not so important.
Thus, you need to successfully complete four chapters, each time escaping from the east coast to the west. With each new repetition, the endpoint will be further away: at the beginning it will be, for example, Texas, and at the end it will be Oregon, Washington or California, if you are lucky.
Well, there are more random events, more obstacles and more opportunities. The same, but different.
Something wrong with my radio!
All the characters in this road thriller are episodic, with the exception of the main character, Fear, and the radio hosts. About five radio stations, I couldn’t count them more precisely, will comment on our actions and communicate on distant topics. And… except for the newscaster, they’re complete freaks.
Fierce, embittered right-winger Steve, who vilifies us with all his might. After all, we are breaking the law with our police chases. And only lousy communists do that! On the other hand, the host of radio Rainbow Revolution will love us very much: an infantile person of unconventional orientation and unconventional beauty (yes, you can hear that!), presumably black. She likes our antics so much that she’ll question our gender identity, because girls rule.
And my favorite radio is Meltdown FM. The local DJ can compete with Trevor Phillips from GTA 5 in his tenacity, only he is less aggressive and more conspiratorial. He talks about how maybe we’re just a crazy pizza delivery guy (Hi Kojima-san!) who doesn’t know how to use maps. He also quotes Philip K. Dick, and also rebroadcasts a Soviet meme about Gagarin, who flew into space and did not see God, with reference to Lovecraftian nightmares. Pure chaos!
There is also a culinary divorcee, but from her we mostly hear about the hard female lot and self-realization. The share is really hard, because it seems like she’s divorced from that right-wing Steve. Yes, you can’t make out this Santa Barbara right away.
Yes, unfortunately, there is politics in the game. And when there is politics in the game, it always outweighs in a certain direction, most often leaning to the left. It’s not so bad here: the radicals on the radio and in the stories are equally caricatured. But here’s an example: helping hippie terrorists blow up a military base is encouraged by raising their reputation. But a hitchhiker who turns out to be a former Nazi can be thrown out of the car. Or throw him out of the car, rob him and write on his forehead that he is a Nazi. And robbery is encouraged.
The fifth wheel
Okay, let’s get back to the core of the game, which is driving. And here lies the main problem.… In the car-riding game, the driving here is monotonous and technically questionably executed. There are three types of racing that will occur most often: classic drag racing, escape from the police and bypass a multi-kilometer traffic jam on the side of the road like a fierce bastard. They’re all about the same, and they get boring by the tenth time.
California Superdeep
And they get bored because the physics here is just terrible, it resembles an iron race. The car is clumsy, and it is very easy to fly into a ditch. At the same time, there is no inertia, as if in this comic reality there is no suspension as such, and the chassis is attached to the body. And it’s annoying, because you’re going to lose races mostly because of that. And you will win them by detecting the stupidity of opponents who perfectly crash into traffic.
No, it’s not fatal, but it’s just a bad car ride in a car game. Perhaps everything is better with a gamepad, which is strongly recommended, but somehow it’s hard to believe that the game will transform.
By the way, you have only four cars. I won’t say which ones, otherwise the editor of the automotive section will have a stroke. And no upgrades, tuning, or anything else. Just a roll of duct tape!
Black and white madness
Everything is not smooth with the visual component either. The fact is that Miller’s black-and-white style is being developed very quickly and is no longer hiding the poverty of the surrounding landscapes. The jackal skybox with static clouds is particularly repugnant. The landscapes are featureless and incomprehensible, as if it were a pretentious student film.
Yes, you can ruin a lesbian wedding here. Application for the game of the year!
And it’s quite difficult to see them, just like your swallow. This is especially critical when overtaking in oncoming traffic, because the white headlights on a gray background are barely noticeable.
Due to such physics and visual, only one camera position is playable. The view from the eyes is done perfectly and adds +100 to the dive, only it’s about diving to the curb.
The damage model from such attacks only affects the visual. And, as in the original Cloudpunk, they didn’t bring a mouse review here. Anyway, you only need to interact with the three-dimensional environment in racing, which devalues it even more. You can’t count crows driving, even in a video game.
At the same time, optimization here is lame on all eight cylinders. You will need a powerful enough hardware to run all this without freezes on high settings. The most powerful is with the RTX thirtieth series, if anything. The shadows are cool, but are they worth it?
The same thing happens with the sound component, the soundtrack. Have you been waiting for cheerful country rock, rockabilly, blues and other goodies all the way? Well, there will be a bit of country music, but the arrivals will often be accompanied by a strange funk and electronic madness. All this is great in itself, but it fits into the setting of road America with a big stretch.
05 Lullaby
04 It’s Electro Gal
02 Ain’t No Hero
03 Me or Them
06 Strait-Jacket
Download or listen online to OST Heading Out (mp3, 20 MB):
As for the radio, the actors are great at acting out the assorted crazies on pirate stations. What they are carrying is a narrative question, it was mentioned above. But the radio is not a radio, but audio diaries from immersions: at the end of the race, you can listen to another disc jockey.Or the radio appears on the map as a separate event. And music lives separately.
And you also have to read subtitles, because not everyone knows English at the proper level. And drive at the same time. Yes, not during the races, but still.
The European view
I see a very striking contrast with Norco in this game. The fact is that Americans made Norco about America, and Serious Sim consists entirely of our Western Slavic brothers. That’s why it’s hard to believe in all the stories here. How Hideo Kojima in Death Stranding made Iceland under the name of America. The USA in Heading Out is made up of stereotypes, cultural cliches and a left-right-blue-red news agenda twisted to the limit.
What is going on in the world is completely unclear. It was only at the fourth race that hints of a time period appeared, and this is not modernity, as it seemed due to the rainbow revolutions, but about the beginning of the seventies. Why are there so many racers in this world? And what other Canadian Civil War is mentioned in the screensaver? Are moose and squirrels shooting at each other?
The empire never ends.
Despite all the above-described rough edges, flaws and blunders, the game has the main thing: it is interesting to play Heading Out. Yes, monotonous and crooked races get boring, and the mechanics of travel are clearly not fully thought out, without a sense of well-coordinated mechanism. The whole bagel story is probably made to wind up the timing, and the plot twist with Groundhog Day in this context smacks of a scenario cramp.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is what awaits you around the next corner, in a new city, on a new road. And so it is every time.
The most wonderful event in the game is called the “Calm Race”. It’s not a race at all. You just drive along a half-empty road with music or a podcast until it ends. And it feels exactly like it does in reality: calm.
Heading Out perfectly conveys the feeling of a lonely journey under the endless starry sky. After all, the most important thing in a journey is to find a new self. And under the endless starry sky, everything else doesn’t matter at all, even if you’re just a dot on the map.
Thanks for mentioning the engine room 🙂
To be honest, I had a stroke back when I read the reviews on Steam. It was really strange to read about such an impudent left-wing agenda when I saw a white Dodge Challenger on the screen straight from the Vanishing Point movie. By the way, that’s why, even without playing, I was sure that it was happening in the 70s, although, of course, if you think about it, the white Challenger can be crammed into any century. But somehow it clicked automatically: the white Challenger is a Vanishing Point – the seventies.
By the way, I still want to play. Just to run the Cheat Engine, hack the karma system, whatever, and get the best ending by playing Donald Trump. In general, there is such a thing: push the game to the maximum and see at what point it breaks.
But still, the queue of sane racing games is still ten years away, so who knows when I’ll actually want to control something that feels like an iron.