Coming soon

About This Game

Every stranger has a story

The world has fallen apart, your car barely runs, and your family is somewhere else. Back Road Stories is a survival road trip on real places, and the people you meet on the road are the heart of it. A travelling medic carrying a surgeon's kit that is not hers. A young courier with a letter that has no address. Camp elders, mechanics, quartermasters, smugglers. They want things. They ask you for favours, and what you do about them is up to you.

You play Cal Mercer, a man in his early thirties with a broken car and a long way to go. You pick the real town where he wakes up and the real town where his family is, and you drive there on real roads and car ferries. Every stop is a new town, a new camp and new people. Help them, or help yourself. Some choices open the road. Some end the journey.

Extraction. Without the shooter. There is no aiming and no reflex test. You park the car, walk into the real buildings around it, search, talk, trade and choose, and you see your chances first. The car is your way out.

People, dialogue and quests

• Survivor camps have people in them. Click a camp on the town map, walk there, and the people of the camp are listed: a mechanic, a medic, a quartermaster, a fuel seller, a fence, a gunrunner, an elder. Each has a way of speaking and an opinion of you.
  
• Conversations branch. You see a short version of each reply, then the full line plays. Most replies are free. Some, like haggling, lying, persuading or asking for a favour, show their odds and can fail.
  
• Quests come only through conversation. Nobody hands you a mission by magic. You talk to someone, you hear what they need, and the journal keeps track. More than thirty quests are offered this way, from carrying a medkit to a camp medic to walking off an injury.
  
• Some people travel the road ahead of you. Four recurring characters (a field medic, a courier, an old lay preacher and a smuggler) turn up at camps along the way, and they remember what you did last time.
  
• Trade is one person at a time. You trade with the person in front of you, mostly by barter, and how they feel about you changes the deal. Someone who has turned hostile will not trade with you at all.
  
• Painted characters with emotions and injuries. Cal and the camp medic are painted in thirty states each: five health levels and six emotions. The portraits of the other people are being finished one character at a time (see Early Access below).

Choices that matter

Every scene has a kind of threat: dogs, armed people, wary survivors, locks and barriers, a wounded stranger, the unknown. Every choice has an approach: talk, help, be careful, stay quiet, run, force it, fight or drive. Some approaches suit a threat and some do not, and no approach wins everywhere. Talking will not calm dogs. Forcing a door is loud. Staying quiet works on armed people and does little for a hurt stranger who needs help.

Every choice shows its chance of success and the reasons for it: your backstory, your skills, your gear, the car, how loud you have been and what state you are in. A failure leaves a mark. You can end up bleeding, limping, shaken, spotted or marked, and those marks make later choices harder. Ignore a mark, pick the approach it punishes, and the next failure is worse. A journey does not end with one unlucky roll. It ends with a pile of choices.

• Who you are shapes the choice. Twelve backstories (paramedic, soldier, burglar, mechanic, hunter, negotiator, cook, farmer, trucker, electrician, courier and teacher) change your odds, your starting kit and your weak side.
  
• You decide how to treat people. Share a bandage, tell a lie, walk past. People notice.
  
• You see the stakes before you pick, and a ledger afterwards shows what happened.

All of it happens in the real world

The streets, roads and buildings come from OpenStreetMap. Your start town can be a small town in Kentucky, a harbour in Denmark or a mountain town in Japan, because the game downloads the town you ask for and keeps it for next time. Real kinds of building (a pharmacy, a hardware store, a school) decide what you are likely to find inside. The stories are made up. The places are not.

• Today, in Early Access: you can pick any place you can search for, as long as a road or ferry route connects it to where you are going. The game downloads the route and the towns as you go, so you need an internet connection for places it has not saved yet.
  
• 40 US region packs are built (37 states and Washington, DC, with California in parts). They are free, optional map-data downloads that make those regions play offline.
  
• My plan for the full release is the whole world, with offline map data for every part of it, region by region. That is a plan, not part of Early Access today.
  
• Car ferries and sea crossings are part of the route. At a port you can pay the fare in cash or in fuel, work your passage, stow away, or talk to the harbour master.

The drive, and every stop

The world map shows your road and your car. Watch your fuel and range, your worst car part, and the next town, camp and ferry. Run the clock at 1x, 4x or 16x, or press Stop here whenever you like. Roadside events, checkpoints and breakdowns can interrupt the drive.

At a stop the real town opens up. Hover a building to see its name, whether it is open, locked or occupied, how dangerous it looks and what is likely inside. Click it for your options: search the rooms, scavenge quickly, break in, pick the lock, rest, trade, talk, siphon fuel, strip parts, climb, or leave. Spots inside buildings (a fridge, a toolbox, a safe) open into a grid inventory, and wrecks along the street can be searched too. Noise is heat: the louder you are, the more trouble you attract. Then you walk back to the car.

• The car is home. You start with a broken car, and fixing it is the tutorial. Twelve parts wear out, including the battery, four tires, the engine, the headlights and the brakes. The trunk is a 10 by 6 grid and the only stash you have. Skip the tutorial with "I know the ropes" if you prefer.
  
• Fuel is a plan. Refuel from gasoline items or siphon it from other cars.
  
• The last stretch is on foot, and the family house is where the journey ends.

Survive the body, not just the street

• A real health system: a blood pool instead of a health bar, wounds that bleed, bruises, broken bones that need splints, five organs and eleven body regions. Open the X-ray Health panel and treat each part yourself, or pay a camp medic. The clock pauses while you look, and every treatment costs game minutes.
  
• Hunger, thirst, stamina, weather and cold: rain soaks you, cold chills you, heat makes you thirsty. Light a fire, cook, purify water, pitch a camp beside the car, and listen to the radio for camps, weather and the road ahead.
  
• Morale: low spirits slow your recovery and cost you odds.
  
• Nearly 600 item types, including tools, lights and batteries, books and manuals, keys and notes.

A skill tree that is your story

Your backstory is where you start on a big skill tree, and what you do on the road earns the points to grow it. Searching, repairing, driving, talking and healing all pay experience. The tree has 468 nodes: fourteen stats such as first aid, mechanics, charisma and lockpicking, perks, and twelve keystones that change how you play and cost you something. You begin with eight points that buy your backstory's preset, and you can rebuild them freely while you create your character. Once you are on the road, what you learn stays learned.

Day and night

The game keeps a clock, and the light changes with it: sunrise, golden hour, sunset and a dark, blue night on both maps. Night runs from 21:00 to 05:30. You drive slower in the dark, road events are more likely, and dark rooms need a light, so a flashlight and its batteries matter. Dim headlights make the night worse.

Death costs what you carry

If you die, you do not start over. You wake up beside the car, "left for dead". You lose what you were carrying, except what your secure pouch holds. The car, the trunk and your skills survive. The death page lists exactly what you lost and what you kept, so every risk is one you chose.

Early Access

Back Road Stories is a working game with a full journey, from the first stop to the family reunion, but it is not finished. I am releasing it in Early Access to get it in front of players while I keep building. Today it is English only, Windows only, mouse and keyboard only, and it has no Steam achievements or cloud saves yet. Saves are local. The journey currently ends at the reunion.

In Early Access today: the people, dialogue and quests above, the real-world route and towns for any place a road or ferry connects (internet needed for places not yet saved), 40 US region packs as free map-data downloads, the health system, the skill tree and the day-night cycle. Still to come: painted portraits for every camp person (only Cal and the camp medic have the full set today), more stories, and the whole world on offline map data. More about my plans is in the Early Access section below on this page.

A note from the developer

Hi, I'm Alex. I'm making this game on my own. I wanted to make a game about getting home, and about the people you meet on the way. Not a shooter, not a power fantasy: a long drive, a few careful choices at every stop, strangers who are more than loot, and a family waiting at the end.

I want to be upfront about how it is made. I used AI tools along the way: ChatGPT to make the painted scene art, the character portraits, the key art and the icons, another AI image tool for the skill tree icons, an AI music tool for the trailer music, and AI coding assistants to help write code. The sounds in the game are synthesized by the game itself. Nothing went in untouched. I chose, rejected, edited and hand-processed everything, and I play the game over and over to tune it. No AI generates anything while you play.

Thank you for stopping by. If it sounds like your kind of trip, a wishlist means the world to me.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Hi, I'm the solo developer behind Back Road Stories, and I want to be upfront about how it was made.

I used generative AI tools as a starting point for some of the content. The painted scene art, the character portraits, the key art and the icons were generated with ChatGPT from my written prompts, and the colour icons of the skill tree were generated with another AI image tool (Gemini). The music in my trailers was generated with an AI music tool. I also used AI coding assistants to help write code, and AI help to draft some of the in-game text. Nothing went in straight from a generator. I read and looked at everything, threw away far more than I kept, and edited, cut out and hand-processed what stayed, and I test the game by playing it over and over.

The sounds and ambience in the game are made by the game's own code, not by AI.

No AI generates anything while you play. What you see on your screen is what I chose to put there.

Thank you for giving a small, one-person game a chance.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Back Road Stories is a grim survival game set after a collapse. You search abandoned buildings and drive between real towns. People can threaten, rob, injure or kill you, shown in text and painted illustrations; the death page shows a skull stamp and a list of what was taken from you. A medical panel shows blood loss, wounds, broken bones and organs on an X-ray-style figure. There is no blood-and-guts gore, no nudity and no sexual content. Items in the game include weapons, ammunition, alcohol, cigarettes and painkillers as loot and medicine. There is no gambling.