In Drive Beyond Horizons, you get to pick between a "Scenario" mode where you play (soon to be) various stories starting with Scenario 1 - where you play as a man in the desert on doomsday seeking to discover a secret 50km away. It's the only available option in the demo. No other scenarios have been announced yet (late 2025) as they are supposedly rebuilding the whole game. The other game's piece-de-resistance is "Infinite Mode" only available in the full version of DBH, where you start at a run down house, a car, some parts, some tools, and you head out to the open highway for adventure and exploration - and restoring cars if that's your thing (it is mine). In the demo, you have a choice of three vehicles, while in the full version, your choice of vehicles to rebuild and add to the starting collection is around 3x as many. You assemble vehicles using original parts and various upgrade parts such as bull-bars, light bars, and turbos.

So here it was, free, Drive Beyond Horizons **DEMO**. I fired up the game, immediatley was met with a Discord message stating it's a demo and that it's not optimized. Seemed to run okay to me. What ensued was about 4 hours of driving around in a Soviet economy car, fighting zombies, trying to survive and find food and water. Died a few times, but I eventually perservered and got to the 50Km line and got abducted by aliens. Even if I wasn't good at it, I was still having fun, and that alone is enough to keep me going. Also, it was very low-pressure.

I spent maybe another week on this before I laid down a highly discounted $14.99 for "early access" to the full version of the game. The full version rocks, but it's complexity really changes the whole vibe of the game, making it much more worth exploring for longer than 50Km. The demo leaves you with three cars to choose from, the ability to only start with one of those, and has limited POI,but is a little easier due to a sparser landscape.

The real deal is the full version opens up the full gamut of the game. Now instead of driving 50Km in scenario mode to either run from or get abducted by celestial captors, they give you a rocket launcher and a whole different mission. Entwined includes a lot of comedy that gets swapped, changed out, or modified over time, ranging from the random golf ball, steering your car with a wrench while shifting it with the lever from a slot machine. Finding a slot machine on the roof of a building, and winning accutrimonts only to watch it fly off into the sky like something out of a hilarious local cable acces show circa 1980. Even the game's own bugs, in a way, are catalysts for comedy, whether it's sending a Zombie literally to the heavens in a twin turbo Musgoat doing 200Kmp/h as a part of some random zombie family just burbling back and fourth across the street, a random car spawning over a minefield and causing one hell of an explosion, or loading your IFA Save with a "land train" of 4 cars only to have it explode with not one, but TWO copies of your towed vehicles flying everywhere like you just won the lottery on some Vehicular slot machine.

For the first few months I played without the radio on and didn't realize Akadz music. I'm pretty much STUCK on Horizon Classic radio now most of the time, particularly enjoying "Nobody Left" and "Getting Down", feeling like I'm in some late 70's/early 80's post-apocalyptic flick. Though Drifto and Mega Bass have been getting some play two more recently, especially when running down Zombies in a modified C18 I call the "Whambulance/Slambulance".

That reminds me, a lot of the fun is assembling the cars in the game. I've put them all together, including the ill-fated Backrooms update "Kart" which uses the fewest parts. There's 11 vehicles in the full version total, and once you complete them, you can start scenario or infinite play with the completed vehicles. I'm about to get started with some more "custom" savegames including a Popyota Monster Truck and maybe an obnoxiously overpowered Kart with the engine out of a IFA....just because something that tiny with a giant Diesel towing full sized vehicles is hilarious.