Hitchhiker - A Mystery Game

I really liked this game except for the ending that was too open-ended, leaving too much up to interpretation. Hitchhiker is a story-driven adventure game with a surreal twist. Gameplay is minimal, focusing mainly on narrative with a few minigames. We play as an amnesiac hitchhiker trying to piece together his forgotten past by following the tracks left behind by his missing girlfriend. We catch rides with a series of peculiar drivers, journeying along American highways while listening to their personal backstories and inspecting all kind of items within each car. The storytelling and travel aspects of the game reminded me of the game [i]Where the Water Tastes Like Wine[/i]. I wish the game had provided a clearer ending, but overall, I found it was a pretty weird and fascinating ride.

Like a lot of other people, I came into this game with several (unfair) expectations. The art style and road trip theme made me think immediately of Road 96, which is genuinely my favorite game of all time. This was recommended to me as a fan of narrative adventure games (walking simulators). When I first fired this up, I ended up turning it off after just a few minutes. It was not because of the complaints that I have seen other people launch against this. It was what I perceived to be the writing. It felt shallow and low effort, and I was not feeling it. I strongly encourage you to put aside your expectations and play through at least the first section of the game (the first ride) before you make any decisions about it. HitchHiker genuinely subverted my expectations at every turn, from the start until the end. If you forget what you were hoping for it to be, you may find that it is actually something that you did not know that you wanted. This is the closest thing to a Murakami Haruki story in video game form that I have ever played. This is not a realistic, straightforward, linear narrative. Magical realism is really the only term that I feel 100% confident in ascribing to this game. Everything feels like a dream, and the sooner that you adjust and learn to speak the game's language, the more you will be able to meet it on its own terms. Practically speaking, this is not a walking simulator. Some people might even deride this and say that it is barely a video game, and I do not think that this is a fair criticism. You are never walking around. There are extremely few puzzles to figure out. The conversation choices are interesting but I do get the impression that they matter much in terms of how the game is going to unfold. All that said, as a bit of an interactive radio play, I absolutely adored my time with HitchHiker. Once I realized what it was doing and stopped expecting it to be something that it was not, I started to really appreciate how unique of a story this was telling. HitchHiker did the thing that all good fiction, in my opinion, should do; it left me wondering afterward about what this was actually about. There are a lot of different ways to interpret this, and that is rare in the video game space. If you are not put off by limited interactivity and dream logic, I absolutely recommend giving this a try. Try not to take everything at face value. Question the varacity of the narrator and the stories that we tell ourselves to dull the pain.

I see this game has a lot of negative reviews and frankly I don't understand why. Maybe it's a little esoteric and subtextual for the casual gamer, but I really appreciated the different art styles and storytelling. If you like narrative-driven linear games this is definitely worth picking up, at least on sale which is a fairly good deal given the time since release. Solid 8/10 as far as I'm concerned, lot's to unpack and will probably have to replay at some point to get a better understanding.

If you're going to make a game with little gameplay, the story needs to be incredible. Unfortunately, that not what we get here.