A Road That May Lead Nowhere is your new relaxation game and audio accompaniment

Indie developer Ian MacLarty, who is responsible for experimental games including the eye-bending madness simulator The Catacombs of Solaris, has just released something new. This one's called A Road That May Lead Nowhere and it's much less likely to mess with your eyeballs.

It's a simple driving game, controlled with the arrow keys or WASD, in which you drive through peaceful countryside that slowly changes. There's no audio, which makes it perfect for giving your hands and eyes something to do while you listen to music or a podcast as some of us like to.

The story behind its creation is an unusual one. MacLarty tweeted that he was going to "jam out a game this weekend" and let people vote on four options. "A road that leads nowhere" won with 33% of the votes (it was inspired by the final line of a JM Coetzee book) and, a couple of days later, this game is the result.

I'm going to jam out a game this weekend. Which game should I make?November 23, 2017

You can download A Road That May Lead Nowhere from itch.io. If you play it, let us know where it takes you.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.