Heading Out’s black-and-white color palette makes for a striking racing game. As you zoom down the interstates of America, everything is rendered in monochrome. Your muscle car ripping down the road, the asphalt ahead, the sky that stretches endlessly above — all range from charcoal gray to notebook paper white.
Well, not everything. If you check your six, you might notice the telltale red flash of a police siren on your tail. When a curve is ahead, you might spot a yellow sign warning you to slow down before you end up sailing out into a pasture, losing valuable time. And, when you check your map, you may see islands of blue signaling your objectives in the atlas sea of gray.
It makes the game imminently readable. If you’ve ever crashed your car in a racing game because you couldn’t tell where the road ended and where the concrete wall began, Heading Out might be for you.
Marcin Krzeszowiec, lead technical artist at Polish developer Serious Sim, tells me this aesthetic arose through iteration. Originally, the game stuck strictly to black-and-white, without the Sin City-esque pops of color. But, the team found that this made it more difficult for players to read the road, and that it was tiring to look at over long stretches. The color solved both problems.
Though racing is a major component in Heading Out, it’s equally focused on storytelling. When I started my demo at Serious Sim’s PAX East booth, business developer Szymon Adamus advised me that sound was a major part of the game, so I strapped on a nearby pair of headphones. The demo began with a character creator of sorts. You can’t alter the look of your protagonist, who will become known as the “Interstate Jackalope,” or Jackie for short. But you fill out their backstory like MadLibs, determining who means the most to them, how they feel about their first love, and more.
After a motion comic intro, I was on the road, and got my first taste of the game’s audio integration in a buttrock track reminiscent of Daughtry. It’s not my favorite kind of music, but it is original to the game. Adamus tells me there are 19 tracks in Heading Out, six with vocals, and all were made specifically for the game. The length of each driving section is determined not by the number of laps you do, or how much distance you cover, but by the duration of the song soundtracking the race. Talk radio is just as important, with 300 broadcasts to hear in the game. The quantity may be a mixed blessing, as all the ones I heard were a little too GTA broad for my liking.
Still, when you’re driving, the game is a lot of fun, with arcade-y controls and shortcuts to discover in each handmade track. Though the game is a roguelite in structure, each area was made by the team at Serious Sim. The procedural generation just determines when they’ll show up.
Heading Out has been in the works for four years, with a year in pre-production and three years of active development. That sounds simple on paper, but COVID hit right as the team was beginning the game, and they had to switch to remote work. They had trouble finding funding and a publisher, which Krzeszowiec attributes to the game’s hybrid genre. Then, just after they found a publisher in 2021, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine and their deal fell through. The team was able to secure a deal with Saber Interactive, who is now publishing the game.
And soon. “We’re nearing the finish line,” Adamus tells me in a fitting metaphor. The game races to Steam on May 7th.
