The experience of driving down a road at night, lights barely able to pierce the darkness in front of you, is one that often ends in horror media with a collision or otherwise a dismantling of something. Driving and travelling in horror often provides a kind of “othering” process as we travel away from something we know, or towards something we don’t – or, in some cases, both.

The protagonist of Dead End Road, a driving roguelike with strong horror elements, is down on their luck. They have a dream they wish to fulfill. Punching in a noun at the start of the game, the player summons an occult demon from the depths of hell who pursues them as they drive to Dead End Road to fulfill the ritual that they began on the other side of the (presumably English) county.

Dead End Road’s finicky steering and ruthless capacity to just stick an oncoming truck in a lane as you come round a bend adds to the game’s intoxicating atmosphere. It successfully evokes text adventure games of the early 90s with its beeps, boops and squawks. It in fact takes wholesale the idea of “retraux” and applies it even to some of its scares, bringing up old error messages that devolve into horror messages that attack the player’s sanity just as they attack the in-game driver’s sanity.

The lower your sanity, the more hallucinations the demon-haunted protagonist sees on the road, and the more dangerous things get out there. You can buy chocolates, sodas, and cigarettes to try calm your nerves, but the only thing that really works is Quaaludes, a hypnotic sedative. Driving sleepily along the road, bouncing from town to town by referring to a physical map, you are drawn into a local countryside, dodging oncoming cars and rain made of human heads.

It is a small, remarkably well-put together game. Yes, it truly is ruthless – I have not managed to complete it successfully. But that is partly because of my method of play. I gather a small group of people, and, as though we are on some accursed roadtrip, take turns on the route. We swap from town to town, with each person taking on part of the responsibility for the eldritch drive.

In this way, the journey becomes even more unique. As we gather the three sacred items to perform the second half of the ritual – a bell, a book, and a candle – we argue over what kind of book will slake the demon’s thirst for sacrifice. In some way the trip brings us together over mundane issues even as we dodge the specters of souls long-dead, pervasively stalking the roads.

In the end, like all works of art, it is not the end destination that truly matters. It is the quest to get there that does. The march of self-discovery, the pushing of our own boundaries, to find what frightens us, what stops us in our tracks – and figure out how to get past it. It is a horror game to be shared, digested, and mulled over with friends, laughing about your own failed attempt as you crash headlong into a power pole, trying to dodge a garbage can that some unseen demon has flung at you from the side of the road. As the flames lick at your dashboard and you stare at the game over screen, there’s a sense of joy that comes from the best roguelikes, or even the best games:

Who wants a turn next?

You can play Dead End Road on Steam or itch.io.

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