No Straight Roads

Submission 5,935

About

No Straight Roads is an indie action/rhythm game developed by Metronomik and published by Sold Out. The game focuses on an indie rock duo who work to free Vinyl City from the EDM empire through the power of their music. The game took three years to develop and faced several delays in release due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

History

Daim Dziauddin and Wan Hazmer began development on No Straight Roads in 2017. Over the course of its development, the game won several awards, including Indie Game Excellence Award at the 2018 Tokyo Game Show^[1] and was included among the Best of E3 2019 by Techraptor and Gaming Trend. The first trailer for the game released April 10th, 2019 (shown below). The game was initially planned for a June 2020 release but was delayed until August 25th, 2020 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.^[2] It released for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and PC via the Epic Games Store.

Reception

The game released to lukewarm critical reception. Critics appreciated the visuals, concept, and writing of the game but lamented poor controls and monotonous gameplay. Across platforms, the game received aggregate scores of roughly 70 on Metacritic.^[3] Writing in Slant,^[4] Aaron Riccio enjoyed the game thanks to the faithfulness to its concept, saying, "The game’s exuberance helps to smooth over its rough spots, like the awkward parrying mechanics, imprecise hit boxes, and messy camera angles that come as a result of being unable to lock onto enemies." Similarly, writer Joe Apsey of PSU^[5] wrote:

No Straight Roads is in no way a bad game and I actually enjoyed playing through the first half of the story and experiencing the world and characters, which are excellently written, voice-acted and realised. But, whilst the gameplay is good, the game tries to do too much and fails to impress with any of the ingredients it offers up on the gameplay front.

Online Presence

The game drew a small hype community ahead of its release. The game's subreddit, /r/NoStraightRoads,^[6] was created April 21st, 2019 and has over 470 members. The game also has a dedicated Twitter account^[7] which has over 6,200 followers. The game also has a dedicated Wiki.^[8]