Review: Glitchhikers

http://glitchhikers.com/

Play...  if you find driving late at night and pondering the complexities of the universe relaxing.
Don't play...  if you prefer your landscape to have more than a few dozen poly's per square mile.

This is an odd little game; another one of those that upon finishing, leaves you wondering if it's technically even a "game" at all.  But like I said in my review of The Plan, I believe a game is an experience, and Glitchhikers certainly delivers an... interesting... experience.

In Glitchhikers you are driving late at night.  You're alone in your car surrounded by a low-poly landscape, listening to strange music on a staticky radio.  You can speed up, slow down, change lanes, and look to your left and right, and that's about it.  As you drive, you will periodically pick up hitchhikers, who will engage you in conversation about the universe, the meaning of life, science, religion, etc.  The folks you pick up get stranger as the drive goes on.  During your conversations, you can occasionally pick your response, and what they say in turn will vary accordingly.  The feeling this game gives you isn't spooky, but rather contemplative.  The topics of conversation are fairly deep stuff, and I applaud the creators for not shrinking from broaching difficult topics.  The entire game lasts about 15 minutes, though you can play it again to see different characters and listen to different conversations.  The dialogue occasionally gets a bit depressing and there are a few instances of mild profanity, but nothing too troubling.

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As interesting as the experience was, I do have my criticisms.  This game had the potential to be more than it turned out to be, and with relatively little more thought and development I think.  While you can choose your responses to the conversation, it doesn't really change it much.  Your passenger will say something a bit different for each response, but then continue the same way, no matter which you choose, which makes the dialogue seem kind of disconnected.  There's also the lack of engagement that I didn't really care for.  Yes, you can speed up, change lanes, and whatever, but it doesn't affect anything in the game.  You can occasionally see taillights up ahead of you, but you can never get close enough to see the car, let alone pass them or otherwise interact with them.  Add to that the fact that the car steers itself, and you can literally spend the majority of the game just sitting there staring at the screen, without even touching the controls.

My final complaint is about the first character you pick up, which is always the same person:  some girl who's smoking what the game hints is a joint, whose smoke occasionally drifts across your field of vision.  This makes me wonder if the creators are trying to make you think the whole thing is just a weird drug trip, and if that's the case, that's really disappointing to me, because I think it cheapens an otherwise thought-provoking experience.

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Despite it's imperfections, the experience is one worth having.  The game is available at the website above for a "pay what you want" price, even free if you want; I got it from Indie Game Stand for a couple bucks, and while I doubt I'll play it much in the future, I think it's at least worth that.  You may like it, or you quite possibly may not.  Each player will likely take something different away from the experience.