Embark on a Surreal Road Trip in ‘Hitchhiker: A Mystery Game,’ Out Now on Rift and Quest 2

In real life, the most exciting thing that can happen on a long road trip is to find a weird pit stop to take pictures at, or to finally finish an audiobook you’ve been slogging through. You won’t find that kind of mundanity in the strange world of Hitchhiker: A Mystery Game, which is out now for $19.99 USD on the Rift Platform and Quest 2.

In Hitchhiker, you travel across the US with the help of five peculiar strangers. But wait, there’s a catch: You don’t remember who you are or even where you’re going. Each ride gives you an opportunity to reconstruct your memories by solving puzzles and having conversations with your drivers.

Hitchhiker was originally released for PC, consoles, and mobile devices in 2021, but the VR version takes advantage of the medium’s immersive potential in a way its 2D predecessors couldn’t. Puzzle elements feel more tactile with the addition of hands for the player-character, and the cutscenes have a new cinematic presentation. Indie developer Mad About Pandas also made other tweaks (more details on that below) to enhance the game’s passenger-side experience.

We spoke with Dan Mayer, co-creative director at the studio and writer on Hitchhiker, about how the team came up with the game’s intriguing premise.

Dan Mayer: In early 2016, our studio had finished a fairly conventional truck-sim game. We became interested in the idea of turning the normal driving game paradigm on its head. “Everyone’s made a driving game,” we thought, “but nobody’s made a passenger game.” The decision to make this passenger a hitchhiker added an emotional resonance to the game: Many people have had the experience of searching for something new on the horizon while running from something in their past. We felt the setup around Hitchhiker created a natural framework for exploring these feelings.

We never aimed to make the game a fully realistic simulation of hitchhiking, since (a) we’re too cowardly to try hitchhiking ourselves, and (b) we understand from those who have that it can be quite boring. But we did want to work in some of the things that we’ve enjoyed on our own road trips, especially the kind of switched-on conversational state that you can fall into on the road while the highway is flying by.

Our first discussions about Hitchhiker were mostly about mood and ambience: a strange and surreal atmosphere that we wanted to create, full of secret connections and hidden correspondences. From this, you can imagine that the film and TV work of David Lynch was a big influence—Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive in particular. We also drew inspiration from narrative games that create a strong sense of atmosphere and place, like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch.

DM: It’s hard to say too much about the other drivers without spoiling a lot of the fun of Hitchhiker. But they’re definitely more than just five random strangers. Each knows more than they let on, and they’re intimately connected to your own backstory in a way that’s revealed gradually over the course of the game.

Hitchhiker offers a strange and vivid cast of characters, and our voice actors did a great job bringing them to life. There’s a philosophical farmer with a penchant for corny jokes and sing-alongs, a flustered academic who accidentally slips down the crack at the end of an escalator while searching for his lost dog, an off-duty waitress with several spare wigs in her car, and an Iraqi refugee whose story is based on real events.

DM: As mentioned earlier, Hitchhiker began with a desire to create a strong sense of atmosphere and place. The deep immersion of VR is the perfect medium to enhance this kind of experience. We’re also lucky that Hitchhiker is primarily a stationary, seated experience, so players shouldn’t feel the discomfort that sometimes plagues walking or running simulators.

DM: One challenge was to engage the possibilities of VR without falling into the trap of making Hitchhiker a completely different game in the process. There’s so many cool things one can do for a VR game, and we had so many ideas about what the VR version of Hitchhiker could become. As it turned out, many of those ideas would’ve had consequences that would’ve warped the game experience bit by bit into something increasingly unrecognizable. So we focused on preserving the original goals and spirit of our project and translating it as faithfully as possible into VR.

On the technical side, while setting up basic VR functionality is quite easy these days, we had to find alternative solutions to numerous details that simply don’t work in VR. For example, simple camera cuts still worked quite nicely, and so we only added a brief fade-to-black transition to make them more comfortable. But for more complex forced camera movements, the range of rotation and movement that we’d implemented in the original game just wasn’t suitable for VR, and so these sequences had to be reworked altogether.

DM: For the VR version, we gave the player-character hands to engage directly with objects in the world around them. This addition makes the puzzle gameplay much more tactile and intuitive, so that’s an improvement that we didn’t necessarily have in mind when we first started the VR production. Also, the 2D cutscenes that break up the dialogue and are one of the most popular parts of the original game to begin with really come to life in VR as massive, IMAX-sized drive-in movie segments.

DM: Hitchhiker covers a lot of ground, asks a lot of questions, and doesn’t try to put a bow on everything at the end. It’s possible to walk away from the game with your own interpretation, and we very much wanted to make a game where people could draw their own conclusions and discuss them with friends. Some fans have had strong emotional reactions to the game, and it makes us happy that the game has connected with people on this level.

DM: It’s been a long, strange journey making Hitchhiker, with nearly as many twists and turns in the road as in the game itself! We’re very excited to be releasing the game in VR and want to thank everyone who’s hitched along for the ride so far.

Unravel the mystery of Hitchhiker for yourself on the Rift Platform and Quest 2 today.