Road to Guangdong

released on Jun 06, 2019

From the publishers of Jalopy, an exciting new road trip adventure. Join Sunny and Guu Ma on the journey of a lifetime, as they travel across China in their aging but beloved family car. Can they maintain their beloved car and overcome their personal history to save the family restaurant?


Reviews View More

This review contains spoilers

Having finished it last winter, Road to Guangdong was less of a game and more of a chore, or rather an example of how not to make a game whilst having such ambitions in vision and expectations put in place for the players and failing to meet both of either.

The stories for each of the relatives you visit felt nice and for the most part it did manage to make me feel invested in them , investigating their affairs , getting to help them out in your own ways, and most if not all choices will end with their story ending happily and netting you their regional recipe to cook at the family feast, and an invitation for them as well. You meet a certain uncle of yours and help him over love issues and his feelings for Guu Ma, you settle a tense situation of succession with Si Fu, and a favourite of mine was when you help out a little cousin with cooking and a dillemma of her own. This so on and so forth continues for each relative you go to , and you have a nice time or dinner at the end of each one, but as the game nears its end it all wraps up in a really cut-and-dried manner to the point where it even feels rather hollow regardless of who you manage to invite at the dinner which ends very anti-climactically with you talking to your Guu Ma and it cutting to credits. There's no more follow ups to anyone's story , nothing in the after credits or something such either be it the relatives, Guu Ma, or Sunny herself.

Moving on to the road trip part of this, it's either just barely tolerable or completely infuriating depending on how you want to feel about it. The driving is very barebones and without much challenge at all besides having to replace/repair most parts besides the engine, very frequently. It was particularly frustrating because it occurs no matter what the quality or usage of your parts lie at, this goes especially true for tires so scrounging them up from scrap heaps and repairing to use became very essential as you will get a game over if one of them fail, having you restart ALL OVER and making the entire journey more tedious than it already was. There's not much of a "1990’s Guangdong" feeling or vibe to most things, and most certainly not the road trip with you travelling long distances on a controlled speed, constant worry of part failure, very poor music variety overall in-game , constant reused lines from you Guu Ma who's sleeping more than half the time , and generic and bland backdrops as far as the eye can see, with the exception of the entrance to each town with the Kaiping Diaolou in particular being a nice touch.

This game captivated me at times , but it was overall a big chore and left a sour taste and an empty feeling in what could have been something more, since this game still has a lot of potential if the developers at Just Add Oil did a much better job or at this point, perhaps never just abandoned it.