Your mind wanders in the middle of the night to strange places. You ask yourself big, inexplicable questions without answers. Then you come to conclusions in the most roundabout way possible. Glitchhikers puts you on the receiving end of this experience.
A small fifteen minute indie title by developers Silverstring Media, Glitchhikers is all about introspection. It tries to capture that feeling of late night thinking, specifically the feeling of driving alone with the radio on and falling down into the spiral of human thought.
Its mechanics lend itself to this type of thinking. You are driving along in your car listening to the radio. The controls are super simple; you can speed up or slow down with W and S, change lanes with A and D, mirroring the feeling that comes over you on a long journey when you click over onto autopilot and suddenly you have driven a hundred miles. Glitchhikers has these little flourishes that embellish that feeling: your character blinks every so often and suddenly you are on a different bit of road. You will see road signs with place names on them with no relation to previous signs.
The hikers are Glitchhikers focus though. They are semi-randomised so you will get one or two different ones each time but it is worth going back to find them all as each play through only takes fifteen minutes. In my first playthrough, I picked up a stoner who had been in an accident, a pregnant alien trying to get to hospital and what I am pretty sure was a Hindu god. Glitchhikers low-fi, low-poly graphics lend themselves to the surrealism of these characters; in the dark of the car it’s difficult to discern whether they are alien or human or something else when they first arrive.
Glitchhikers innovation comes by putting you on the receiving end of late night introspection. The ghost of a little girl discussed nihilism with me and I found myself responding with positive notions: even after everything’s gone my atoms will go on to be part of something else. She left after a moment, disappearing without saying anything else. I chatted to what I am pretty sure was a woman with a whale for a head about why whales beach themselves. Is it suicide? Is it sonar messing up the whale’s navigation? When we could not agree she asked me to drop her off. When they are gone you are left with the music on the radio to ponder the questions that the hikers posed.
A persistent question that came up from a couple of different hikers was ‘Why are you driving?’. By doing this Glitchhikers is asking people why they take journeys and this is reflected in the fact you get asked multiple times and by different people, so you can change your answer. It is the only time where the introspection really turns to you and it is always a neat little moment: what does a journey mean to you? Glitchhikers is a neat little experiment in trying to look at how introspection works for different people and it will always leave you to think about what you have learnt when they are gone.
It does have its sticking points. The voice on the radio absolutely reeks of Welcome to Night Vale and whilst I do not have a problem with it, it felt like it intruded on the quiet moments of driving with the brilliant soundtrack with a rubbish Cecil Baldwin impression (and name dropping David Lynch in the first line.) The lo-fi graphics create the surrealist atmosphere well but it would be gorgeous to see something a bit more fleshed out and detailed to go along with the stark beauty of the base graphics – this is very reminiscent of how I felt when I played the Source mod version of Dear Esther.
If you have ever sat up late at night and wondered how the universe works I can highly recommend Glitchhikers. Even if you have not the feeling of walking home in the dark, confused about your own place in the world is one we all feel. Glitchhikers is a beautiful and disconcerting look at this kind of midnight, radio fuelled introspection that we all, eventually, find ourselves in.
Glitchhikers can be downloaded here.
Tags: dear esther, Driving, glitchhikers, introspection, late night, Silverstring Media, welcome to night vale
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