At it's core, it's a driving simulator. You get to drive through the desert, finding and fixing up cars. There's two modes: the popular "Infinite" driving mode where you just get in a car, and drive, and if you've driven past 200Km, you can tailor your experience to a threat-less experience aimed at the joy of driving, all the way to a full blown, Zombie Infested, Post Apocalyptic Nightmare with unreliable cars, short tire life, and a constant fight for survival. Scenario mode introduces you to the vague plot involving UFOs, a sickness, and Zombies, as well as an "endless highway" (more like a 2 lane road) upon which all this occurs. In 2026, various quality-of-life improvements were made such as the addition of a "garage" to store your found vehicles in, and a monetary questing system that allows you to modify your cars, garage, and anything else in game, to your heart's content. There's also a multiplayer mode where up to 4 people can enjoy an adventure together (all cars can seat at least 2-4 people, some even more than that).

Enter Drive Beyond Horizons...with a Retrowave style label art, and a Musgoat in the logo, of course I wasn't going to pass this free demo up. For the next 4 1/2 hours before going to the vet, I basically tried multiple runs of surviving the desert against Zombies, thirst, hunger, and my weird soviet style ride breaking down due to not checking the oil for drunken piss and not realizing tires in this game had a finite shelf life. Each attempt was a fun exercise in randomized difficulty.

This game, in it's full version, literally drove me to go out, buy a GPU, and make a "gaming" machine again. Prior to this, the most graphically intensive thing I had was "Backrooms: Found Footage" which I had to reserve to a Dell XPS 9550 laptop frankenstein I call the "Frankendell" to play (with the heat of a skillet and the frame rate of an Tiger LCD handheld). So in September, I slapped a cheap NVIDIA 730 in my hot-rodded Lenovo desktop, later replaced in succession by a 750Ti, and now a RTX 3050 6GB LP after I started testing (a whole other experience I'll share someday).

Now let's talk about the evolution. When I bought the full version in mid 2025, for $15 on Steam, it was not that much different from the demo. The three cars (Dada, Musgoat, Poyopa pickup truck), expanded to about nine-ish (UAZ, IFA, Bolf, GTR, TriClops, Bonphiac, and a Go Kart made out of a shopping cart). You had to save ever vehicle in it's own save game if you wanted to keep the vehicle you were driving, and there was no way to really exchange. Multiplayer was janky at best, there were a lot of hilarious bugs and translation errors everywhere, and overall, it was a fun game to just sit down, and poke around with for hours. Very addictive already.

By December, they had applications for Beta testing for one weekend, so I joined those, and was one of the testers for the "Garage Update" that came out later and added a separate "garage" feature where you could store, work on, and customize your cars to your hearts content (and have been testing ever since). It also added an in-game monetary questing system, and the ability to share parts/items between multiple savegames and/or the garage, as well as the ability to further customize your vehicles with non-standard paint colors and change handling characteristics. More cars have since been added (Tomahawk, Peak, Loft, Escada, P-51, etc..) and it just seems they add more cool/new stuff all the time.