A Desert Bus homage that retains much of the original experience but trades the pain of extreme patience and exhaustion for the pain of demanding continuous input from the player.

Heatstroke seem unsatisfied to simply be Desert Bus with typing and includes a large quantity of interesting art assets and a shockingly extensive soundtrack, these additions however seem to come from a place of bargaining knowing that Heatstroke will never live up to the legacy it celebrates.

The narrative the player is forced to type is highly engaging (if a little slow to start) which is almost crueller than if it was just mindless drivel. In fact HeatStroke seems to be obsessed with cruelty, limiting the players pause time, declaring their progress not being worth saving and actively lying to the player on various occasions.

All in all HeatStroke feels more like tumour plucked from the brain of a insecure wreck of a developer than a project ever intended to be played by human beings.

A Desert Bus-inspired game, that seems to be draining on the surface, but upon playing you discover that beyond the simple gameplay, there is a captivating science fiction horror story, that challenged me. The writing is terrifyingly good and is well worth the trial of sitting at the computer for hours on end to complete. It will drag you through the mud most definitely but by the end, you'll see it's worth it. A good quote from the games narrative, to represent the game itself would be, "For a moment I felt like crying but knew no tears would arrive."

Let's be clear: I fucking hate HeatStroke. HeatStroke also hates me back, so it's a fair deal.

I have an immense respect for HeatStroke. HeatStroke does not respect me at all. HeatStroke is a cold, bitter asshole who wants me to suffer and struggle and fail. HeatStroke is a bad coworker who piles file after file into my inbox and silently, smugly drops in another handful as soon as I'm done with the last block. HeatStroke expects me to sit there for — what I can tell from the people masochistic enough to actually finish this — about five hours doing nothing but typing and veering back into the middle of the road, with only 900 total seconds you can take as a break on the pause screen. Fifteen cumulative minutes of a break for a five hour typing spree. Under the Canadian Labor Code, where I live, HeatStroke would be filed a compliance order by the board for not giving me a free half hour to myself for every five hours of work.

It's an art project designed to test your patience, and it broke mine. In that, it succeeds.