Hitchhiker is a mystery game set along lost highways, where your goal is to solve the puzzle of your own backstory. As a hitchhiker with no memory or destination, you catch a series of rides across a strange landscape, tracking the mysterious disappearance of a person close to you. Your drivers range from stoic farmers to off-duty waitresses, and each one has a story to tell. Clues appear, alliances emerge, and nothing is quite what it seems. As your journey continues, you must decode the events of your past while confronting the dangers that lie ahead...

Your first driver is Vern, the Tom Selleck-esque raisin farmer.

Hitchhiker is a game that is not really a game at all, more an animated movie with a few simple puzzles tacked on to make it feel like an interactive experience. It's a shame because it's original, the vocal acting is perfect... yet somewhere along the line the developers forgot to make this engaging on a gaming level.

You start, with no memory of who you are, in a car heading... who knows where. The driver, a Tom Selleck-esque raisin farmer by the name of Vern, seems to be hiding something. As you chat and search your surroundings you start to uncover where you're from and where you're going. But, just as you and Vern are getting to know one another you find yourself in another car, with another driver. There are new puzzles, new revelations about your past... and this is how the game continues through several more drivers before you discover the truth about yourself and your past.

On your quest you meet several different drivers.

I think the biggest problem is that Hitchhiker is really an animated short film... not a game. The mystery isn't really original or surprising and the route to get to the truth is meandering and full of hippy nonsense. There is a set storyline that you follow no matter what your choices are. If you decide to be aloof/rude, your driver doesn't really react and if he does it's back to normal for the next piece of dialogue. In one instance he even forgot what I'd said previously and contradicted me. It's this lack of being able to get your driver to reveal anything new or exclusive depending on your response that makes it feel like you're just going through the motions.

The ended left me with more questions than it answered.

Even someone who has never played a console game before should be able to complete this in a few hours. And when you have, there's little to make you want to replay it. The ended left me with more questions than it answered (a bit like life, I suppose) and I thought that maybe replaying the levels would unlock something new... Maybe the drivers would interact differently with me... but they didn't.

There also seemed to be an issue with the main menu. Sometimes, when you finished a chapter, it was impossible to progress to the next part unless you quit the game and reloaded it.

It's such a shame, because Hitchhiker could have been a truly groundbreaking experience. Sadly, what we end up with is a rather cliched tale that is neither challenging nor engaging enough to make it worthy of your time.

5

Darren Rea