An Essential Steam Deck Title: ‘Heading Out’
Heading Out, an early May title from Saber Interactive and developer Serious Sim, is the first racing-oriented game in years to catch my attention. Half-racing game, half-visual novel, Heading Out presents a striking comic book noir art style interposed with compelling rogue-like elements. It’s a formula for a game that, unlike the tired Zelda-meets-Dark-Souls indie formula, completely fascinated me from the moment I first saw it at PAX East this spring. After dozens of hours cruising around the midwest, Heading Out has become almost as essential as Hades and Vampire Survivors in my Steam Deck library.
I have never considered myself a fan of racing games, despite the fact that when I unwrapped my first ever game console – the Playstation 2 – it came bundled with a copy of Gran Turismo 3: A Spec. Nevermind the hundreds of hours I’ve devoted to multiplayer Mario Kart 8 lobbies with friends. And please don’t look at my achievements for racing-adjacent games like Sleeping Dogs. I guess the point is that even though I don’t love racing games, especially realistic simulators like the Forza Horizon series, sometimes I develop a soft spot for them.
What makes Heading Out work so well for me, as opposed to a realistic car simulator, is that I am a sucker for video game stories that encourage player choice. Classic narrative adventure games like Telltale’s famous The Walking Dead: Season One present memorable stories that largely hinge upon the player feeling like they influenced the outcome of the story. Often, this choice means the death of a character, or the relationship you end up having with other characters in the story. Heading Out offers little in the way of emotional gut-punching, but the granularity of choice throughout the game makes the story feel truly replayable.
Like many adventure games before it, Heading Out begins by asking the player to decide a few key characteristics about the protagonist before his journey begins. These choices manifest in terms of where this character comes from, what relationships they had, what pains they are bringing with them, and why they are going to their inevitable destination. The mixture of music, comic art style, and voice acting give the impression of a wild west outlaw on the run – whether from the cops, his past, or himself: it’s up to the player to decide who this driver is.
Once you make your initial gameplay choices, the true fun begins. You are turned loose onto a sprawling map of the United States interstate system. Nothing but roads populate the map. Across the country, your destination awaits, marked down south. Your route involves an intensive system of resource management – gas, money, focus, reputation, fear, wanted level – and your job as a player is to choose the best route to reach that destination. What makes this game fun (and occasionally tough) is how quickly your route can go wrong, ending your progress and resetting the game entirely.
As to the resource management in Heading Out, let’s briefly unpack each of those mechanics, because the interlocking nature of these systems keeps me engaged in a similar way to that of Hades: everything you pick is a tradeoff with something equally beneficial. Sometimes you think your run will be enhanced by replenishing your resources, but sometimes you run out of something you didn’t even see coming and get surprised to your demise.
Gas, for example, is pretty straightforward – it costs money to refill your tank and keep going towards your destination. Money, on the other hand, is awarded for participating in things like races, but races drain your gas. Sometimes, passersby on the road are in need and you can choose to steal from them, lowering your reputation, and other times they will pay you for your kindness. Each choice is a gamble. Then there’s focus, which is your driver’s fatigue level; if you neglect it, your character will fall asleep behind the wheel, eyelids blinking to cover the entire screen in darkness while you race. Reputation is rather straightforward, opening up or closing off encounter options with people along the routes you choose. Fear is a red line quickly encroaching behind your progress, threatening to end it all if you let it catch up. And of course, along the way, as you try to outrun fear or streetrace your way into refilling your gas tank, you piss off the police, and suddenly you find yourself in a mildly GTA-inspired sequence where you have to outmaneuver, crash into cop cars, and eventually make your escape.
In addition to the Hades comparison, Heading Out reminds me of Neo Cab, a tragically overlooked indie that I reviewed a few years back. Neo Cab is also a visual novel and resource management hybrid, but sans the driving elements. Like Heading Out, Neo Cab requires you to balance your need to earn a living with other compelling restrictions. While Heading Out may not have the memorable character design and chill soundtrack of Neo Cab, it offers its own, albeit masculine, take on that formula, injecting it with the adrenaline of muscle cars and high-stakes run-ending consequences.
Then there are the dialogue options you are presented with in Heading Out. As alluded to, some choices are simple, even spelling out the consequences to the player. Others are more nuanced, presenting you with a few paragraphs of backstory, or continuation of the main story you decided upon at the beginning of your run, and these choices follow until the next major node. Sometimes, the game’s radio stations continue these story threads, informing the next choice you make; other times, you might catch yourself so caught up in resource management that you lose the narrative entirely. I think that fluctuation within each run’s focus adds to the compelling nature of Heading Out rather than detracting from it. When some runs feel story driven, and others feel resource driven, my desire to continue playing after successfully (or failing to) completing a run compels me forward.
I first played Heading Out on the show floor of PAX East this spring. The developers were so welcoming when they saw me standing there, visibly interested in their game after Matt Storm of the Fun & Games podcast so ravingly mentioned it at dinner the night before, that they pulled out a Steam Deck from under the console display and set up a demo for me. I stood there with my friend and Epilogue writer Barry Irick as we weaved through the midwest interstates, and after eventually being overtaken by fear, I handed the Deck back to the members, ready to wishlist it.
As a handheld game, the visual style of Heading Out mapped so well onto the Deck – the game was clearly built with this machine in mind. The only potential negative I might offer is that the text, when it does come in paragraphs, can be a little smaller to read than it should be. Admittedly, this is a common issue with Steam Deck ports, but if font size is the only potential negative I can offer, that speaks to how well considered every other element the Heading Out port was for the Deck. From art style to frame rate to button mapping, it just feels like an essential title if you have one.
I was lucky enough to receive a review code from Saber Interactive upon Heading Out’s release, and even though I had time to rush out an article by May 7 when it became purchasable by the general public, it took me over a month to sit down and start writing because I simply didn’t feel done with it. After finally coming to terms with those Hades comparisons, I realize now that Heading Out became that “essential” title for my Deck when I took it on an airplane flight. Rogue-likes are rather perfect for the Steam Deck because they promise consistent stopping points and fresh replay value if you are still in the mood to play games and you’ve got an hour ahead of your destination. You don’t have to commit when each race is about three minutes and each node on your route takes maybe two if you lay off the gas pedal.
The only thing I might seek improvement from Heading Out upon is its cultural decisions regarding writing. There are no openly queer characters that I encountered in the game, and seldom people of color, for one. Sprinkled throughout a few of my runs were some phrases and terms that rubbed me the wrong way, like when a character said “that dude’s a chick” at the end of level one; as a transgender woman, I’m uniquely sensitive to language choices like this, and it appears abundantly clear that this is a game written largely by cishet white men with little input from elsewhere. Another weird one for me was “McChunky” when talking about ice cream; though clearly written as a punchline, I can’t escape the implied fat shaming in this line and can’t overlook it. Largely, the game is not written with these hints of problematic cultural values, but I can’t ignore them in an otherwise glowing article such as this. So player: beware.
Ultimately, however, I look forward to many more drives and misadventures through the American interstate system. If DLC dropped for Heading Out, I would be there right away, but the game feels so well thought out and conceptually complete on its own that I don’t think it needs additional content. Heading Out may not be infinitely replayable, because after about five runs, I encountered lines of dialogue, characters, and levels that I began to recognize and therefore dulled the feeling of newness that my first few runs brought me. But the fact that I left Heading Out installed on my Steam Deck after hitting these notes of repetition speaks for itself: there is quite the addicting game loop here. Any fan of racing games, visual novels, or rogue-likes – especially all three – owes it to themselves to try getting behind the wheel of Heading Out.
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