I’m in love with this game. It is hard to love sometimes and is undeniably extremely niche, but all real love is this way, I think.
Dead Run made me feel and imagine a lot of things that I wish more post apocalyptic games would.
Here, you are truly lonely. There are no raiders or mutants; there is no exposition or lore. "Things" that try to hunt you are incredibly rare, to such a degree that I went out of my way to get killed by one. Apart from one person making a repeating radio transmission and pilots in airports (which are few and far between), it is only you, your car, and dead bodies on the streets. On the whole Earth, it is only you.
Speaking of which, no game made me feel so small and insignificant (in a good way) as this one. You are looking at yourself from a bird’s-eye view, making your character take up no more than a few pixels on the screen, dwarfed by the surrounding expanse. You are constantly reminded of the minuscule scale you are operating at: you can think that you’ve covered a long distance, but you’re just one zoom out of your map away from understanding that on a global scale, you’re basically in the same place that you’ve started in. Endless roads, forests, and occasional silent buildings. Here, I’m just a little nameless (names don’t matter anymore) guy coursing between the husks of old cities and towns overgrown with trees. I’m doing it just to get by, listening to some apocalyptic beats and eyeing my last can of beans on the road to the next abandoned grocery store.
All of this combined with the minimalistic nature of the game sparked up my imagination, I really felt immersed in this game, like I AM this handful of pixels, not just controlling it. I didn’t really need to, but I was even trying to find good places for a campfire to sleep at the next night, stopping at lonely structures in forests or searching for enclosed spaces in cities where nothing would surprise me (nothing could, actually, but I felt compelled to do so).
For me, this game is very immersive, meditative, and strangely relaxing. All of this is not without some hiccups, though. Occasional bugs can be solved by going to the main menu and loading your save again, but they are still annoying. The fast travel system and traveling via planes are especially broken and made me hate my time here while I was trying to complete the main and only quest. The way they work and the distances and random locations you must visit to "complete" the game ruin the feeling I described above. I think they should’ve been left for the Exploration mode, not the Survival one.
All in all, I can recommend this game more as a meditative interactive experience, not as a fun way to spend your evening. You’ll love it if you’re willing to let your imagination run wild and immerse yourself in relaxing loneliness and insignificance. Also, avoid fast travel if you can in Survival; it's not worth it.