In Drive Beyond Horizons, you play as a middle-adged bald guy living in the middle of a desert. Is it is house? Nobody knows. But you start at "home" where you prepare for a journey of your own making. In the demo, you just have "scenario" mode which has you driving 50 Kilometers (not sure what that is in Imperial measurement off the top of my head) to "find a secret". In the full version (Early Access for $14.99), you have a second mode "Infinite" which I believe is for the purpose of just exploring the landscape, restoring cars, and unlocking achievements. Yes...restoring cars, that's a thing in this game.

There's a decent array of classic automobiles you can run around the desert putting back together with all original parts for achievements and unlocking those cars as your starter vehicle. THe default starter is a Soviet Russian Lada VAZ model, but includes cars from all over the world including JApan, America, and Germany, making it very hard to pin down this game's setting because the landscape screams Australia, but there's European elements, and the American elements that scream somewhere like Arizona or Rural Nevada. You have to drive over 20KM before you can do this.

Dotted across the landscape are many locations to explore and find things at, Ranches, Gas Stations, Radio Towers, Garages, Bars, Auto Wrecks, Outhouses, Bus Stops....all of these sources of sustainance, and occasionally, encounters with brain-hungry Zombies to take down with your fists or a couple firearms added to the game (a Missile Launcher and an AK-47 rifle). Other risks include Landmines and your own stupidity, particularly at Gas Stations.

So enter the apocalypse, a real possibility in America soon given the current regime, and I'm in this old shack, alone, because there's nothing else to do but drive around and rebuild old wrecks. It's post WWIII, the Aliens have landed.

Starting out with the demo. You have 50km to drive to spend the night (most likely at a gas station) and witness some kind of "Secret". Along the way you fight zombies for car parts and have three cars to pick from to build up - the default being a "Dada" based on the Russian Soviet Lada VAZ-2101 passenger car from the cold war era. These have a 1.2-1.5L 4 cylinder engine, and a 4-speed manual (which the driver automatically shifts for you). Along the way you encounter a lot of strange stuff...including this mysterious item to the left we put on the car bumper and it did various Pr0n style noises to the O.G. Lada I started with - but it gave me the "Sound Engineer Achievement"....though any idiot could put that on a exhaust pipe. It was hilarious though. Zombie Slasher II (Above right) was the primary car for the actual ending though. It was sucked up into the skies by Aliens shortly after getting gas and I decided to go back home and celebrate the celestial visitors. Guess they wanted to party with me.

Zombie Slasher II Was a Lada VAZ-2101 with Dome Lights for headlights, a Toyota 4x4 brush guard for mauling Zombies at highway speeds, A taxi sign just because, and a Police Siren because Mad Max and Cheap Trick. Strangely, I never impaled or encountered any Zombies that time around. The Auburn Tiger Lada however (above, left) was an almost fully restored car when the game crashed and I guess they finally decided to launch the nukes against the aliens, either that or the Zombie Hordes that I was taking down with a succession of randomly found AK-47 rifles. That's the best way in the demo to dispense with the Zombies, .762x.59 rounds and then fisticuffs once out of ammo. Actually it seemed odd they put in a "Reaload" feature but no ammunition to be found as far as I know.

The Demo was great gameplay wise and was reasonable on all the systems with discreet graphics that I tried. This is likely due to far less lush and far less varied landscape. However, it sucks that you can't save the game, otherwise it'd be great to mess around in for fun.

The full game on the Lenovo has been on several tries. I took down the Aliens the first time driving a blue Lada and armed with a rocket launcher. I had the car almost completley restored by the time I beat the game. I think the only thing I had left was a dome light - because I did not know what that detail was. Kinda' wish there was a way to keep cars.

It's second incarnation (above) was the "Ladyota" as I call it. Basically, I used parts of the Toyota Pickup Truck on the Lada and decided to "update" the front end. I was still looking for a headlight. Unfortunatley, it was destroyed in a 50mph collision with a telephone pole while the wife was hurranging me about some celebrity gossip shit.

Right now I'm running a 67' Mustang Fastback in the "Unlimited" game, with the hopes of doing some full car restorations....after basically giving up on the Lada (what's the point in being a Dada restorer? It's ALREADY in the menu by default as a starting vehicle). This is fitting because the Mustang is more my kind of car - it's blue, it's a Ford, it has rear wheel drive, it off-roads well, and best of all, it's fast...actually it's so fast my NVIDIA card can't keep up with it, LOL. And it struggled when we turbocharged the LADA that got me to the Mustang.

The games have not been without their problems though. I built a pretty beefy Lenovo Thinkcentre with a Core i5 8th gen CPU and a NVIDIA GT730...well, as you can see above, there are some issues in Linux Proton regarding "Shaders" I believe. I use Proton 7.0.6 with the latest driver for this "legacy" card. Actually, the card does a great job as long as it's not high-noon or raining in the game. One looks like of like that David Bowie video about Major Tom being gone from like, 1980 or so, the other one was a rainy day with the Lada where I figured out I Could find the car by using the night-vision goggles to find the seats and wheels in a fully built configuration. This was after I'd spent maybe an hour running around in a circle doing some kind of maniacal computer guy rain dance trying to find my car. A second attempt I decided to wait at the monster's spawn point, and messed up by doing a "test launch" while standing in the middle of the grid of exits (the monster spawns from that location 5 minutes after entering the backrooms), and got sent to the checkerboard floor world. What is the Checkerboard Floor World? I dunno. Maybe I'm in a demolished eternal Freddy Fazbear's Pizza....who knows at this point.

The game has it's weirdness, which is something else I like in relaxing titles like this. Whether that's lighting up a rave at a radio tower with a UFO showing up shortly after, or getting chased around by a Smiler while in the backrooms trying to build a go-kart out of a shopping cart. I tried to take a picture of the entity in the Backrooms too but it looks like they programmed it in not to let me or something. Either way, he's a big honking mess, pun intended.

On the last day of the game's "Backrooms" event (ended Sept 3rd), I fired up my game with the blue COmpetition Mustang and started getting multiple Motel Californias all in a row. In the first one, I started building the cart, and then the monster decided to come to the starting room and...well...I was prepared this time, I had a rocket launcher with me (huge grin)....and I launched that rat bastard right into next week, except...it broke the game....Atari 2600 Adventure style! Now I was stuck in a wall, and the monster TRIED to kill me, but couldn't kill me. It did, however, paralyze me and got me stuck in a wall, where I could now flip the bird at the Honkin' and Bleepin creature, probably upset because now it doesn't know what to do. Why nobody thought to use a rocket launcher on the Backrooms monster is anyone's guess, but it was a lot of fun. I need to do that again, even though it messes the game up to holy heck!.