Game review 07 May 2024, 03:00

author: Giancarlo Saldana

Heading Out Review: Racing Your Fears

Part racing game, part visual novel—Heading Out is a visual joy ride that lets you make choices that impact your experience. It offers you plenty to do but may still leave you wanting more.

The review is based on the PC version.

When I first played Heading Out back at PAX East earlier this year, I was instantly sucked in by the game’s unique presentation that blends aspects of old road films and comic books with the simplicity yet resource-driving elements of roguelites. It’s one of those games that slowly starts to makes sense the more you play it and slowly unravels into an allegory to running away from your fears.

There is a lot that goes into Heading Out that makes it a charming little experience and it goes beyond being just another racing game. Your choices can shape the story you craft for yourself and your decisions can impact your overall journey. It’s one of those games that keeps you guessing what’s coming next, and despite some ambiguity, gives you enough variety that sticks with you for a while.

Highway Star in the Making

Heading Out tells the story of a mysterious driver known by many as the Interstate Jackalope racing through the United States for some unknown reason. The game is composed of four acts, each one developing your character’s story, exploring their past, and shaping your character to be the kind of person you want them to be. At the start of each one, you can select answers to questions regarding your aspirations, past regrets, and even greatest fears which shape the game’s story and give it a more personal touch as you play.

This is where Heading Out can become as introspective a game as you want it to be. Jackie, being short for Jackalope and his or her default name, can be you if you answer some of these questions more personally. Do you want to say your true love is unrequited, is your first kiss a sad or happy memory, and are you happy with your current relationship status? Because the game also plays out like a narrated visual novel, each scene you witness becomes more poignant when you feel it speaking to you directly instead of about some character you made up. The choice is yours of course, but I found it more rewarding playing Jackie as close to me as possible.

The story-driven decisions you make throughout your journey can also change people’s perception of your character and give you some light RPG touches that personalize it to your liking. As you travel from city to city, you will encounter scenarios that force you to make a decision in how you will resolve them. Your choices can increase or decrease your reputation, turning your character into a good Samaritan or a renegade. These decisions also impact your survivability, but they give your story some touches unique to each player such as when talk radio hosts summarize your exploits or criticize you for not paying for gas or fleeing the cops.

While radio hosts can offer some reflection on your past actions, the majority of the time they prove distracting from the overall tranquility the game tries to highlight. Driving through Midwestern desert can be a mesmerizing experience so you don’t always want to hear about some annoying radio host’s dog going to the bathroom on one of her paintings. Thankfully, these segments only come up when you finish a race and only last a minute or so, but because they repeat over time, they take away from the uniqueness of each of your playthroughs.

Its music, on the other hand, is a joy to listen to even if it is limited to a small selection of tracks. These range from country to jazz to even angry rock and are the perfect accompaniment to high-energy escape or races for money. More mellow tracks also provide a relaxing soundtrack to the occasional “chill races” the game offers you where all you need to do is drive and relax. These can help replenish some of your resources and offer you a moment of reflection that also highlights the game’s amazing art direction. Despite its monochromatic palette, its world is vivid, detailed, and truly captures the majesty of driving through the American landscape.

Road Trip Planning

Part of the game involves racing against others, but a big chunk of the game involves also choosing what roads you will take to your final destination. Each act starts you off in Michigan, but you then have the choice of selecting how you will get there. Some routes are shorter than others, but the longer ones features various decision-making encounters, races you can win for money, and even traffic jams for you to overcome. Your resources such as money and focus wane over time so you really do need to make strategic decisions sometimes in order to make it to the next city.

While the game is mostly a racing game, your decisions on how to get to your destination can impact your overall resources and provide some roguelite elements to your experience. For example, if you choose to engage in races for money and win most of them, you will have enough money to replenish your gas at each city you get to, but if you don’t encounter any races or run out of money, you may need to outrun the cops if your reputation is too low and the gas attendant doesn’t want to help you out. Conversely, if you’re broke and can’t afford to rest or buy coffee to stay awake, your focus will diminish and your races will see the screen fading to black to represent your character dozing off—a nice but dangerous touch.

Getting to your destination is the objective, but you also have to remember that you are outrunning this looming fear that is constantly following behind you. You can visually see it in the map as a blood-red trail that infests the roads you just traveled, but you also hear it take shape as you play through each act. You can also control the speed of how fast you travel between cities to create a bigger distance between you and this fear, but going too fast will drain your wallet and increase your wanted level leading to more things to worry about.

Tune Ups Needed

It’s great to see how your little actions can impact your playthrough, but sometimes the game will give you impossible situations that almost make it seem like they want you to lose. There are a couple of errands people will ask you to do for them which involve making it to a city in a set amount of time. You get money out of it, sure, but sometimes these cities are ridiculously far from your final destination meaning you have no way of outrunning the fear if you end up taking on these tasks, making them either unfair or poorly thought out.

During races, the game’s AI can also range from being very good to being downright dumb. Unfortunately, rubber banding is at thing here so expect the AI to catch up to you if you find yourself too far in the lead. On the other hand, if the AI is too far ahead you will need to rely on perfect driving skills and the occasional shortcuts to overcome it. This is especially evident in the game’s challenge mode, which makes races more difficult and resources harder to come by.

You may not want to play it all in one sitting, either, as its races are great for quick bursts of fun but can get repetitive if you do a long play session, which shouldn’t be a problem as the game is about six hours long. You also unlock cars with each act you complete, but you can’t use them all from the beginning of a playthrough making you wonder if you simply unlock them for the sake of the story even though the car you drive has no impact on the story at all. Sure, they control a bit differently but they don’t provide anything beyond the cosmetic upgrade.

Final Thoughts

At the end of your journey when you finally reach the end of Act IV having travelled so much, you’ll be left wanting, well, more. Heading Out gives you a character with an interesting but nebulous past, and while you occasionally see more of it come out in vignettes and cutscenes, you still don’t really know them. Your actions also seemingly affect the world around you, but you don’t really see how impactful they are beyond the occasional radio host summarizing it for you. Even once you get to the end and realize why you were running away in the first place, you will wonder if the game is purposefully vague because it wants you to put yourself in Jackie’s shoes and answer those questions for yourself.

Heading Out seems like a great start to a game or a series that could continue to expand and get better. It lays the groundwork for some impressive ideas and concepts that racing games don’t usually tackle and offers you a chance to reflect on your own life in a surprising way. It’s fun and worth the ride, but all its best parts will leave you hungry for more.

Game reviewed on Steam with PS5 controller.