Electric Highways

The Good
Through ten short and abstract stages, Electric Highways has players explore a virtual reality world, while its creator considers how such worlds enable people to retreat from their real lives and social interactions.

There is no time limit, which the game is considerate enough to make clear from the very start, nor is it possible to lose the game or get stuck. Some items have to be collected, but they're not really hidden, and only serve to unlock the next stage. The few jumping sequences are also easy enough to beat. The focus is clearly on exploration.

The developer aptly describes the title as being closer to a music album than a traditional game. Each stage has its own distinct visual style and musical theme, and there is a sense of structure to the entire piece. Overall, the style is inspired by a late 80s, early 90s vision of a VR future, with minimalistic, Chiptune-influenced electronic music. Fittingly, the game runs on the BUILD engine, most famously known from Duke Nukem 3D, which gives the visuals a very distinctly mid-90s style that should deliver some instant nostalgia to people who have been actively playing computer games in that decade.

The game subverts the usual aim of recreating realistic environments by playing with synthetic and animated textures, optical illusions, deliberate glitches, and other visual tricks. Although it's fairly tame throughout, people prone to nausea when playing 3D games might not appreciate some of the environments, though, not least because the disconcerting effects are reinforced through the old-fashioned rendering techniques.

The Bad
The story that is being told in fragments was overall a bit too abstract for my tastes. The game's description shortly outlines the scenario it takes place in, but the further content is restricted to rather disjoint thoughts that supposedly should cause players to think about Internet escapism, technologically-supported asociality, and mental health. It was really way too vague and directionless to do that for me, though. The background is too specific to make the game completely open for interpretation, but the environments and story fragments do not offer enough detail for any great deductions about what might be going on.

The Bottom Line
While the game is very much an affair of style over substance, then, it's still worth a look for anyone who appreciates the particular style it's going for. I had fun on this short walkabout, enough to do it a second time and look for the clues to see the alternate ending.

Anyone who likes their explorations to be finished off with some conclusion or revelation will probably be left looking for the payoff in vain. Challenging puzzles or dramatic storytelling aren't part of the concept here, either. This is a surreal, musically accompanied short trip through an obscurely grim and disconcerting virtual reality world. Anyone who thinks that sounds like an interesting idea should consider going through the roughly 45 minutes it takes for the full experience – the game is free to download, after all.