Rides With Strangers Demo

Although it happens quite rarely, most people have been in situations where they had to depend on strangers. Whether you hired someone to repair something for you, or asked someone for help when you were in danger, it’s not usually a very bad idea to rely on unknown persons. However, it can also go horribly wrong, especially if you happen to find yourself entirely alone with a peculiar individual.

Rides With Strangers is a horror game in which survival is your main concern, yet the enemies are not zombies, monsters or aliens. Instead, they are regular-looking people, although once they start talking you can understand just how irregular they really are. The game is pretty unique in regards to gameplay and story, but it still needs plenty of work to evolve into a finished product.

The story revolves around a girl by the name of Elora, who just found out about being selected for an interview at a prestigious firm. However, the interview is very far away, and just to make things worse, her car breaks down on the road. Hence, she must hitchhike the rest of the way, and the drivers who stop to help are in no way sane or particularly friendly, at least not really.

So far, there is only one driver you can hitch a ride with, namely a weird priest who apparently likes to strike down heretics. The gameplay is quite simple, although a little unpolished at this stage. Once you get in the car, you must use everything at your disposal to distract the driver from attacking you, such as answering their questions with the right answers, turning on the radio, opening the window and so on.

Keeping an eye on the driver prevents them from attacking you, but you can only do so for a certain period of time. Hence, it is capital that you time these glances just right, otherwise you’ll run out of them. Granted, you also have the choice of jumping from the car and hitching a different ride, but the progress to your destination resets if you do this more than once.

All things being equal, Rides With Strangers still has a lot of bugs and too little content right now, but the idea is worth pursuing. It’s actually quite scary to imagine yourself in a car with an unstable stranger, especially since it’s not a sci-fi scenario, but a very real one.