Wheels of Aurelia

Wheels Of Auerelia is a story experience with a basic driving game to keep you occupied as you read dialogue. You play as Lella, who meets a woman named Olga at the disco, and they go on a road trip from Rome, Italy to the border of France.

The game is set in 1970’s and the story mentions the political struggles at the time. There are 16 different endings, and each play lasts around 15-20 mins, but it always feels like it ends suddenly as there doesn’t seem to have the correct pacing to build to the story’s conclusion. The ending is simply a wall of text describing what happens to the characters in future.

Since it is a story-based experience, I think the game would massively benefit from voice-acting, since reading the text distracts you from driving, and you lose a certain amount of personality from the characters.

You drive down long straights and small turns, with rare branching roads giving you a choice of how the story progresses. If you hold the A button, you speed up and have full control. Letting go of the button puts the car on autopilot although this is quite janky and will often drive in the middle of the road, leading to collisions with oncoming cars. There's no consequences to crashing though; you are simply bounced without any damage to your vehicle or without any kind of reaction from your passengers. The exception to this is when you passenger specifically requests you drive carefully; since this can then lead to a different ending if you disobey them.

Speech bubbles pop up whilst driving and you can toggle through your responses. After letting the timer run down, your character will say the response and the conversation continues. Silence is always an option. These dialogue choices can impact the story. Another way of impacting the story is choosing to pick up the hitchhikers. They will give you a destination which means you will need to travel to an alternative city.

Since you can say nothing, and let the car drive on autopilot, it is actually possible to reach an ending simply by watching and never pressing a button.

The game got off to a bad start when it explained the controls using xml; something like “<sprite name=”xbone-x”>” which bizarrely meant the A button.

I feel like the basic gameplay could have been part of a more engaging game - it basically feels like an unfinished prototype. This feeling is enhanced by the fact that the story seems to end abruptly. I feel the game would be much better if it had around 4 quality stories rather than 16 rushed ones. I only found 5 endings but I wasn’t interested in playing further.