The Long Drive

The world itself is intentionally simple but effective: an “almost infinite random generated desert,” anchored by a road that the dev describes as currently 5000 kilometers long, with filling stations and small buildings scattered along the way. That’s where the best moments happen—rolling into a lonely station with your tank running low, scavenging parts, and leaving with a slightly different, slightly more cursed vehicle than you arrived with.

It also has light survival/maintenance, but not the “hardcore sim” kind. The Steam page calls it “minimal car maintenance and survival elements,” and that’s accurate: you’re not doing a 40-step checklist before every ignition, but you are managing enough to make each stop matter. The game even sets expectations for the driving economy: with a full tank, you can supposedly go around 500 km, which helps the pacing feel like a real journey instead of a fuel panic every five minutes.

Now the honest part: this is a jank-forward game. The dev’s own Early Access notes say the game is relatively stable and that “game breaking bugs are rare,” but most inconvenience is physics-related—and yeah, that’s the whole vibe. Sometimes the physics are hilarious in a “I can’t believe that worked” way; other times they’re annoying in a “my car should not be doing this” way. If you’re the type who wants consistent, polished handling and predictable systems, this will test your patience.

The other big asterisk is development cadence. It’s still listed as Early Access, and Steam warns that the last update was over 2 years ago and that timelines described by the dev may no longer be up to date. That doesn’t erase the fun that’s already here—players still rate it Very Positive overall and recently —but it does matter if you’re buying it expecting a steady stream of new content or a clear path to 1.0.

If you like emergent stories, memeable disasters, and games where the journey is the point (not the destination), The Long Drive can be weirdly addictive. If you need tight objectives, polish, and modern QoL, it’ll feel like driving a shopping cart downhill: occasionally brilliant, occasionally painful.