Adrift Review

It’s Just You And The Truck

HIGH Racing down a canyon while the perfect track plays.

LOW Falling through the world over and over.

WTF What does all of the Greek statuary mean?

Meditative driving isn’t as big a genre as it seems like it should be. Anyone who spends a lot of time behind the wheel can relate to the feeling of losing oneself in the experience of simply cruising along a highway, letting the scenery blur into the abstract vibes of a landscape — of letting the world drift by while the hum of the road gradually changes into a soothing white noise. So many driving titles are about accomplishment, rather than the joy of the journey itself, but Adrift is a rare exception.

Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future, Adrift casts players as a trucker tasked with delivering a fuel cell to a utopian city – the catch? It’s not exactly clear just where that city is. Also, the fuel itself is unstable, and will explode if removed from a cooling station for more than a minute or two. Fortunately those cooling stations are well-spread throughout the world, and even more fortunately, the player can park the fuel core at any station they come across, allowing them to freely explore the world with no limitations other than physical geography.

This scouting makes up the bulk of Adrift‘s runtime, and it’s an absolute pleasure to take part in. To be clear, this is going to be an experience of limited appeal, because other than a little bit of shortcut construction, the only gameplay on offer is speeding around captivatingly empty landscapes and memorizing routes — and I cannot overstate how vital a good memory is to success in Adrift. While there are maps, they’re available only at scattered survey towers, and cannot be saved. They’re also extremely lacking in detail, offering only the shape of ridgelines and markings representing the few broken roads left in the aftermath.

In this context, Adrift asks players to fully ensconce themselves in the world, to crank up the music (a set of hypnotic tracks that perfectly match the oddly-colored world) and speed their way around. The official task is to find the exit to each level, and then memorize a route from cooling station to cooling station so that the fuel can be moved safely to the next map. That’s not really what the game’s about, though. No, it’s best in the moments between objectives when the player is taking the time to appreciate the varied landscapes. There are dusty deserts, overgrown swamps, ruined industrial districts, lush forests – each new leg of the journey offers a unique opportunity to luxuriate in the wonderful graphical style.

Unfortunately, Adrift has a major drawback that keeps it from being the chill experience the developers were hoping for – it’s currently a little broken. Not in any major way, luckily, but in a sign that it wasn’t playtested nearly as much as it should have been, in a few of the maps I found fairly major holes in the world – places where I’d be driving along and then suddenly clip through the ground and have to watch my truck tumble into the ether.

More than once these gaps occurred on key pathways leading to a level exit, forcing me to fall again and again until I’d carefully mapped out a way around the invisible obstacles. These weren’t game-breaking problems, but in a sense they were worse because they ruined the game’s flow. Adrift is supposed to create the feeling the title suggests, with the player gliding through a dreamlike world, getting around to doing the whole ‘energy delivery’ thing when they finally feel like it. Bug testing is not at all what I signed up for, and it sapped my goodwill whenever I encountered it.

Still, I can’t say that Adrift didn’t have the intended effect on me. Speeding through the world while listening to the perfectly-tuned soundtrack, I did find myself getting lost in the experience, exactly as the developers hoped I would. More than once I knew the exact route to the next objective, yet decided to do a few more dry runs, just because I was enjoying the driving too much. I’m not saying that there aren’t frustrations to be found in Adrift, but I still found this one of the most relaxing things I’ve played in ages. Just being in this world is a delight, and when I’d finally finished exploring it, I was a little sad that there wasn’t more to see. It won’t be for everyone, but for those who click with it, it’ll be just what they were looking for.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by S.K.9.8. It currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 8 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but the content is likely an E10, and that’s only because some of the classical statues in the game might technically feature partial nudity, although they depicted from such peculiar angles that it’s almost impossible to tell.

Colorblind Modes: The game contains no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is offered via text and visual cues. Text cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

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