dead run

A surprisingly compelling little mood piece, unfortunately hampered by bugs. The game uses real world map data to cool effect, generating a new 'world' every run based off real roads. This amplifies the sense of surreal isolation that is the strongest asset of this game for mine. The gameplay is very simple; you're searching for basic survival resources, putting simple upgrades in your car and driving to the next point. Don't expect anything deep mechanics wise, but it's effective for what the game is going for. So, the bugs. Saving and exiting often seems to make your car go missing. Your car will seemingly randomly go missing regardless. I've found another driveable car once in three playthroughs, so it's not a realistic solution. Considering the car is so important this is pretty frustrating. There's also some funky stuff going on with the map data at times - you'll get giant chasms opening up in the earth, or areas you seemingly cannot traverse. A couple of quality of life features would be really handy: a 'find my car' button and a manual map marking/waypoint system chief among them. It's not a glowing recommendation, but it's a cool little piece of work. If you like the washed out watercolour look and want to zone out to some cool music and bask in the isolation of an empty world, it's worth a shot at the price point.

This game should be titled early access. Not only is it full of bugs, the gameplay is boring and monotonous. One doesn't play this game so much as hold a key down and wait patiently for something (anything) to happen. Buildings don't load, trees located in roads, it's just a boring expanse of trees that you keep running into. I stopped playing when my car got wedged between two trees, unable to move and making me regret the time I had spent thus far.

Sokpop is an intriguing little studio. The games are incredibly fun, due in part to the simplicity and playfulness. I would probably play this game for hours if it didn't have so many bugs. If this game worked it would be worth much more than the $3 they are asking, but at present it is worth nothing because you can't play it long enough to get anywhere or do anything without reloading constantly. I hope this game gets fixed! I want to drive to my hometown.

It's ten million sticks when all you need is a fruit.

[h1]Dead Run uses real-world map data to procedurally generate a vast, empty world. Unfortunately, that's all it does.[/h1] The description of "1+ hour of gameplay and endless exploration" is strangely fitting; you could pour days of your life into this game and come away with no more than an hour's worth of mediocre gameplay, stretched across millions of miles of empty roads and nondescript box buildings. You'll come across a random zombie about every five minutes. Half the time they've already died - presumably of boredom. The game clock helpfully ticks away in the top-left corner, reminding you that every minute you spend in the game is another minute of your one, precious life that you'll never get back. You'll pass dozens upon dozens of sticks, screeching to a halt whenever you see the occasional fruit, driving a vehicle with possibly the jankiest physics I've ever encountered in a videogame - the back tires swinging wide with every turn, as though you were drifting around a corner at six miles per hour. A bug where your car would just straight-up disappear has thankfully been patched; the only thing worse than exploring Dead Run's desolate landscape in a vehicle would be doing so on foot. Unfortunately a bug where you'll destroy a gas can when cancelling its use remains. The radio signal turns out to be scientists who need you to - guess what - drive to other locations and report back to them. Nope. Absolutely not. One hour spent playing this game was already an hour too many. The best thing that I can say about Dead Run is that I hope the developer can one day use the knowledge and experience they gained from creating it to make another game. One that isn't terrible. One that is unlike this one. Not worth your money, your time, or your interest. If you want a game about exploration, I promise you that any device capable of running Steam can support a better game than this one. Your machine deserves better. Not recommended.

I’m in love with this game. It is hard to love sometimes and is undeniably extremely niche, but all real love is this way, I think. Dead Run made me feel and imagine a lot of things that I wish more post apocalyptic games would. Here, you are truly lonely. There are no raiders or mutants; there is no exposition or lore. "Things" that try to hunt you are incredibly rare, to such a degree that I went out of my way to get killed by one. Apart from one person making a repeating radio transmission and pilots in airports (which are few and far between), it is only you, your car, and dead bodies on the streets. On the whole Earth, it is only you. Speaking of which, no game made me feel so small and insignificant (in a good way) as this one. You are looking at yourself from a bird’s-eye view, making your character take up no more than a few pixels on the screen, dwarfed by the surrounding expanse. You are constantly reminded of the minuscule scale you are operating at: you can think that you’ve covered a long distance, but you’re just one zoom out of your map away from understanding that on a global scale, you’re basically in the same place that you’ve started in. Endless roads, forests, and occasional silent buildings. Here, I’m just a little nameless (names don’t matter anymore) guy coursing between the husks of old cities and towns overgrown with trees. I’m doing it just to get by, listening to some apocalyptic beats and eyeing my last can of beans on the road to the next abandoned grocery store. All of this combined with the minimalistic nature of the game sparked up my imagination, I really felt immersed in this game, like I AM this handful of pixels, not just controlling it. I didn’t really need to, but I was even trying to find good places for a campfire to sleep at the next night, stopping at lonely structures in forests or searching for enclosed spaces in cities where nothing would surprise me (nothing could, actually, but I felt compelled to do so). For me, this game is very immersive, meditative, and strangely relaxing. All of this is not without some hiccups, though. Occasional bugs can be solved by going to the main menu and loading your save again, but they are still annoying. The fast travel system and traveling via planes are especially broken and made me hate my time here while I was trying to complete the main and only quest. The way they work and the distances and random locations you must visit to "complete" the game ruin the feeling I described above. I think they should’ve been left for the Exploration mode, not the Survival one. All in all, I can recommend this game more as a meditative interactive experience, not as a fun way to spend your evening. You’ll love it if you’re willing to let your imagination run wild and immerse yourself in relaxing loneliness and insignificance. Also, avoid fast travel if you can in Survival; it's not worth it.

Empty and boring. Any of their other games are amazing, this one is definitely a miss.

stuck at loading screen

[h1]絵画のような世界の終末アドベンチャー[/h1] 筆で描かれたような世界を放浪し謎のシグナルの発信源を特定するために旅に出る。 ランダムスタートと実際のGPSデータと言う事でかなり広く長く遊べるオープンワールドのゲームだ。 ランダムスタートと言ってもアメリカ大陸メインなので世界一周ができるかどうかは検証してみないと分からないかも。 最初の拠点で電波塔からマップ内の情報を入手。 物資を集めて車を修理していざ出発。 あとは道なりに進めばいいだけ。 無線シグナルまで行けば話が進む流れになっているが… [h1]クソみたいなGPSを頼りに進む[/h1] このゲームの最大の魅力は現実にある道のGPSから作られた本物の道。 しかし街中はまだいいが、目的までの道のりのワールドマップは大雑把なハイウェイの位置があるだけ どの道を進めばいけばワールドマップのハイウェイにたどり着くのか正直分からない。 「話を聞かない男、地図の読めない女」ではないが…プレイする際には地理把握能力が求められる。 短いキーワードをよく理解し、地図を見て道を選べ [h1]ゲームモードはサバイバルとエクスプロレーション[/h1] エクスプロレーションモードは探索モードで、空腹や燃料の心配はいらないのでドライブシミュレーターとして遊べる。 最初はこちらで感覚をつかんでみてからの方がいいかもしれない。 [h1]サバイバルモードは空腹と燃料の戦い[/h1] 一応ゾンビアポカリプスになっているのか時々アンデットらしいモノに襲われる。 しかし集団に襲われることはないので、すぐに車に乗り込めば大丈夫。 攻撃手段は…ハンドルを握って体当たりだ！ 基本的にはサバイバルなので自身の空腹と車の燃料を気にしてプレイすることになる。 最終的には何所に在るとも分からないシグナルの発信源を探すことになるので探索が大事。 探索はかなり限界的で物資が枯渇しやすいので注意。 家のマークのある街に行けば電波塔があり、そこからタウンマップを見て アップグレードや物資などが手に入る。しかしかなり分り辛い。 街に近づいたら下車して辺りを注視すると電波塔が見えてくるはず。 特に燃料などはこの街でしか見つからないので必然的に探し出さなければサバイバルモードは詰む マイナス点 実際のGPSマップからフィールドが生成されるので、最初のロードに時間がかかる事があり時々空白地がある。 空から廃車が降ってくるバグとかもまだある。 車のハンドリングも過敏なので少々運転も難しい。 もう少し燃料と食事に余裕があればサバイバルでもどこまでも走れるが難易度はかなり高い。 オプションで音が消せるが、個人的にはBGMだけ消せるようになると嬉しいなぁ。好きな曲がかけられるようになるしね。 見た目のデザインがやはりSokpopと言った感じで独特のセンスが光っている。 [h1]終末世界で対向車のいない道を気持ち良く走り続けたい人にお勧め[/h1]

I think most Sokpop games could be a real success, if they would take it seriously and add more content and refined the controls. This one could be good too, but sadly it is a disaster. The good: - i liked the artistic minimal graphic and the dead world, full of empty cities and woods, abandoned cars on the road and dead bodies, etc. Whatever: - there is an explorer mode, it cut out the interesting but annoyingly luck based survival parts of the game. It could be good or really bad, you decide. Bad: - the only bad thing is, there is no bad thing, only really bad thing in this game. Really bad: - the worst of all is that you starve to death within a day, while food items are very rare items. Fixing this alone would change this terrible game into playable game. - no key redefining, as a lefty i hate it. Sokpop makes a bunch of games, why they can't make a general option menu for them? - no options to manage sounds and music. While i liked the music, it can be tiresome after a long time. - minimal help about the controls, you have to figure out the WASD move keys, but the game tells you to use E key to use an item. - moving the camera with cursor keys is slower than my old mother. Easier to turn around with the car to look around... - can't zoom. I recognized the first dead body in the fifth day while stopped the car. They was hardly recognizable on foot, because of the far camera view. - can't zoom in the global map enough. I barely found the destination signal tower, i was on the right spot according the map, but it was still a large area to looking for it. - you spot the items on last half second while drive. You have to frequently drive back to check them, because moving the camera is a waste of time. - items are very rare and no clearly defined where you can find them (except sticks, they are everywhere). You can find fruits in the woods and in the cities, fuels in the cities, but because the items are rare you can waste a lot of time walking/driving around and find a big nothing. In short, it is luck based and you starve to death very fast. Most meaningful crafting needs a scrap metal, but i managed to find only one at the start of the game, as it was intended by game design. So i have no knowledge about the crafting except building the mandatory firecamps. - There should be a local map after you download it from the tower. It worked on at the start, but found no other towers except the destination one, but it gives no local map, which is really bad, because that would help you to locate items to survive. Managable annoyances: - the car slipping more like a drunk guy on ice. Managable, but annoying. - sometimes the roads are very "artistic", road lines goes into the air and roads sometimes seriously uneven or full of trees. - the world is full with buildings and abandoned cars, but you can't use them as resources at all. Mysteries: - you can drive on water bodies. - there is a health bar, but it never changed, even when i slide into trees with my car. Maybe discarded but not removed part of the game? Or later something try to kill us? There is an archivement which implicates this. I found a painkiller once in the game. - after the signal tower i should go and get samples around the world. I can't find them on the map. I found like one map mark which maybe one of them, because i didn't see it before, but i couldn't check it because i starved to death. Maybe i should wrote this to the "Really bad" section.