U.S. Route 160

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

Okay, this is getting spooky – I’ve had a bunch of similar games come up one after another in the order the Comp’s randomizer handed me, and this time the points of overlap are really uncanny. Remember how in Chase the Sun, the protagonist was a runaway bride, gay but on the cusp of marrying a guy due to family and social pressures, escaping by driving westward, and still wearing her wedding dress? Yeah, new bottle, same wine. You can even get to an early bad ending via a car crash, albeit this time it’s more clearly signposted because what do you think is going to happen if you choose the option that has you nod off while driving? But I gotta ask, did I like miss a TV show or something that’s providing a common jumping-off point here, or is it just a creepy coincidence?

There are some differences, of course. Most notably, instead of the lush forests of western Pennsylvania, here you’re driving through the sun-baked desert at the Colorado-Arizona border, which is obviously less lovely but just as pregnant with metaphor. Less positively, the prose is more inconsistent. Some passages boast a solid, albeit adjective-heavy, invocation of mood:

"It’s sandstone, dust, and dirt everywhere you look, wind-worn and desolate. Large dust clouds rise up, making the sky a grimy blue."

Other times, though, the author seems to get overpowered by their own metaphors:

"You’re on U.S. Route 160, a massive stretch of concrete spanning east to west with almost nothing in between. You could say it’s like a head without a brain – everything’s just swimming in the middle, floating in and out."

I can’t picture how that’s meant to work, and even if I could, it’s even harder to picture what the image is supposed to add to the first sentence.

There are also some typos that make me wonder whether the game was partially written with text-recognition software – “tool” for “tulle”, “ultraviolence” for “ultraviolet” – as well as too-quickly-vanishing timed text, that make the reading process a little sloppy (there’s also mention of an advertisement prompting you to “call 1-800-JESUS for absolution”, which put my down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to see when the US moved to seven-digit phone numbers within area codes – a long time ago, as it turns out).

This inconsistency characterizes the substance of the story, too. While there are at least three endings you can obtain, they’re all varying flavors of tragic, with the differences between them largely coming down to titrating the balance between fleeing your past and confronting it. The protagonist has more than her share of trauma she’s working through, and while I’m sure this is sadly realistic enough and reflects many folks’ experience, as artistically rendered, it falls a little flat. Her mother is a two-dimensionally abusive presence, while her fiancé is a domineering, reactionary preacher who seems entirely motivated by wanting to make the protagonist’s life terrible by marrying her, without a clear view of what he thinks he’s going to get out of the equation. I’m more than willing to accept that such people exist – I mean, look around – but as literary creations, these two aren’t up to much, and similarly, the protagonist’s angst, while dialed to 11, lacks much heft.

The flip side is that the protagonist’s lover is completely amazing, but here at least there’s some specificity of description:

Featherlight thumb brushes away crystalline tears.

Her eyes are stardust.

Galaxies threaded through the freckles across her nose.

A black hole in the scar on her upper lip.

The imagery is familiar and overwrought, but in a romance that’s forgivable, and there’s something affecting in the giddy, cosmically-abnegating delight the protagonist takes in a flaw as small as her lover’s scar.

The other difference with Chasing the Sun is that where that game ended, at least in my last playthrough, in a moment of connection, U.S. Route 160 seems to lead to the pain of final separation no matter what you choose. This is a reasonable storytelling choice in the abstract, but it’s one I found dissatisfying here; since the game portrays negative emotions with less verve than the positive ones, wallowing in sorrow means engaging with the weaker, more cliched parts of the writing, and most of the endings didn’t seem especially cathartic to me, with over-the-top violence sometimes deployed to make up for a lack of emotional heft.

I can understand the impulse to write downbeat narratives; with so many messages of positivity beaming at us through every channel, it can be empowering to reject all that and explore the possibility that it won’t all work out in the end, and posit that both fleeing from evil and confronting it are doomed to fail with the choice largely just a matter of aesthetics. But for that approach to produce an effective story, the darkness needs to be more compelling than the light, like Milton’s Satan showing up his Godhead; unfortunately for U.S. Route 160, here the reverse is true.