Death Road to Canada
Entry by Nadia Chursinoff
Introduction
Death Road to Canada is a pixelated indie survival road-trip game set during a zombie apocalypse in which the ultimate destination is the zombie-free country of Canada. Death Road was published by Rocketcat Games and developed by a collaboration between Rocketcat Games and Madgarden. Released on July 21st, 2016, Death Road to Canada offers single-player or cooperative play for up to four people. This game offers a quick randomly generated gameplay experience each time, ensuring a new experience with each replay. While bigger gaming corporations may follow formulated successful aesthetics and narratives, smaller company-produced games or indie games often push artistic bounds, experimenting with unusual themes, in-depth storytelling, and captivating visuals. The rise of pixel art within indie games has been largely brought about by necessity due to its cost efficiency compared to the hyper-realistic art style of games like The Last of Us, Death Stranding and Detroit: Become Human. However, this departure from hyper realism does not represent a correlating separation from the emotional element that has become so vital to video games today; pixel art has been also shown to evoke feelings of nostalgia and create room for the player’s imagination to take over. The ambiguity of pixel art creates an abstraction that prompts the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps left by pixels and its “involvement is an ingredient that influences and takes a prominent role in the overall gaming experience” (Paez, 78).
Gameplay
Within this pixelated world, the player starts by creating a custom character fit with their own traits and perks or generating a random character. Perks are the skills of the character, affecting their stats and may help determine their starting weapon. Some notable perks include Athlete, car nut, fighter, gungineer, health care, and mechanic. Taking place in a zombie-ridden USA, the characters begin their adventure in Florida. The opening dialogue starts with the information that there has been chatter from some survivors that Canada is a zombie-free haven, for those who are brave enough to make the trip.
The total length of the trip is 15 days, during which the characters must fight off zombies while scavenging for food, weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies in different settings such as rest stops, gun stores, and the off-brand Walmart, “Yall-mart”. The survival aspect of this game brings a captivating horror element, despite the playful nostalgic feel of a pixel universe. The immersion brought by a video game allows a player to exchange reality for fantastical worlds and in this case, a doomed apocalyptic journey across a familiar but simultaneously shockingly foreign land. Forcing the virtual physical engagement of living in danger and surviving evokes strong feelings of anxiety, giving appeal as a horror element for video games (Perron, 13). While characters are shown driving on the road (or walking, in the event where the vehicle is lost or destroyed) the game flips to a choose-your-own-adventure-based game: randomized scenarios are presented to the characters, most often as a metaphorical hurdle that the party must overcome. The player(s) must choose one of four given options which can drastically change the party’s fate. Though the consequences may appear randomized, the game takes a statistical approach, where a set probability of the successful outcome of a decision determines whether the chosen path will lead to a favorable outcome or to failure. Much like the table-top game Dungeons and Dragons, the event checks the character’s skill value (strength, fitness, mechanical, medical, wits) and can raise the chance of a successful action. For instance, upon encountering bandits with sweatbands, the party decides to challenge them to a pose off. A low-strength character will have a 90% chance of failure and will result in total food loss, half ammunition loss, medical supplies loss, and decreased morale. However, a character with an athlete or a ‘megabuff’ perk will have higher strength and fitness stats, increasing the probability of success, beating the bandits, and raising the party’s morale.
Themes
Marketed as a co-op survival party game with wacky events around every corner, it is easy to forget about the zombie apocalypse lingering over it all. Death Road to Canada does an excellent job at tying together themes of humour and horror into a palatable video game suitable for audiences of all ages. Horror themes within video games add a unique experience for players, evoking emotions of fear and creating an overall tension that keeps players on the edges of their seat. Horror video games also create an immersion unlike any other form of media, as the character’s goals, fears, and motivations meld with the player’s emotional state during the game; this projection of intense feelings that arises from the direct interaction between players and the exploration of horror settings rises far above any investment in the well-being of characters in horror movies that a director may strive to arouse (Rouse III, 20). The monster of zombies within a video game creates an interesting environment, as Zara Zimbardo writes, “The zombie apocalypse is a glimpse of a radical, violent renewal of the social order. It is a massive Control-Alt-Delete” (286). She goes on to write of a new social hierarchy that forms during such events: a hunter-gatherer mindset forms, and currency no longer becomes paper or plastic. Within this game, characters stumble across trader groups with the majority of the currency being food. The scarcity of food and the fear of starvation is a common theme within the zombie narrative in popular media.
The sound design of a video game plays an important role in engaging the player. While looting various locations for weapons, medical supplies, ammo, and food, a retro style 2-bit gaming soundtrack plays, reminiscent of the original 1985 Super Mario Bros and the 1986 Legend of Zelda. This quaint tune gives a feeling of nostalgia and enhances the visual aesthetic of the pixel art. This soundtrack plays an important role as the change in music switches as it gets darker while looting. As day turns to night, the zombies become increasingly aggravated and more spawn in, making it harder to explore or even escape back to the vehicle or road. A darker eerie soundtrack signals the arrival of large hordes of zombies, evoking feelings of heightened anxiety and prompting the player to leave as quickly as possible. A study found that when people played a horror video game with sound, they prioritized reaching a safe spot or completing the objective over exploring the environment, in comparison to those who played without sound (Wöhrman, 12). The study also noted that without sound, players easily got bored and lost interest in the game. One paper explores the video game Amnesia as an exploitation of the human fear module with vigilance and persistence being rewarded in the face of game-induced negative emotions (Clasen, 135). While Death Road to Canada may not evoke such intense fear, it does reward vigilance (thoroughly looting and knowing when to stop) and persistence (learning through trial and error, which locations are worth looting, and choosing the best path during events).
The main objective of this game is to make it to the great north, which is free of zombies, the reason of which is unknown. Death Road to Canada does little to explain the lack of zombies, though the general theme of Canadian freedom is a common one in other media. The creation of a horrific situation set within USA but stopping magically at the border is shown most notably in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where Canada is depicted as a haven from the oppressive regime of Gilead and the ultimate destination of freedom (Atwood, 96). This utopia stereotype can even be traced to literature depicting slave narratives, using Canada not only as a symbol of freedom and safety, but also as a comparison to emphasize the horrors of American slavery (Kang, 442).
Autoethnography
Death Road to Canada has steadily received positive reviews as fun, unique road-trip simulator to play with friends. I first played this game with my family and promptly lost spectacularly. Though its randomized events create a unique storyline each play, it also allows for more ways to die and lose the game. I continuously find this game to be difficult to win, yet fun to play. The events get increasingly risky with more devastating consequences of failure that can end the road trip quickly. To ensure better success of these scenarios, it is best to recruit the maximum number of characters (up to four) with a wide range of specialties to deal with any event. However, more players eat up food and medical resources quicker, lowering morale and creating despair ultimately killing the character.
I began playing Death Road to Canada myself as a way of virtual exposure therapy for my extreme aversion to zombies. A study found that virtual exposure therapy was effective in lowering certain phobia symptoms and can allow for a higher level of control over intensity and constrains (Freitas, 1703). As a traditionally less scary zombie game, it became a springboard for more zombie media. Films such as Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland eventually progressed to the more fear-focused zombie media: Train to Busan, 28 Days Later, and The Walking Dead franchise. I look fondly upon Death Road to Canada as a gentle introduction to zombies and despite walkthroughs and message forums, I still have not made it to Canada, perhaps one day.
Video Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QD25nl_-M
Citations
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale, McClelland and Stewart, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985.
Clasen, Mathias, and Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen. "A consilient approach to horror video games: Challenges and opportunities." Academic Quarter| Akademisk kvarter (2016): 137-152.
Freitas, José Rúben Silva et al. “Virtual Reality Exposure Treatment in Phobias: a Systematic Review.” The Psychiatric quarterly vol. 92,4 (2021): 1685-1710. doi:10.1007/s11126-021-09935-6
Kang, Nancy. “‘As If I Had Entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and CrossBorder Literary History.” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 431–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40033673.
Paez, Sergio. “A visual Renegade: A phenomenological and aesthetical examination of pixel art.”, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2022, 10.13140/RG.2.2.26045.13285 .
Perron, Bernard. “Survival Terror.” Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, University of Michigan Press, 2012, pp. 10–32. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65swb6.5.
Rouse III, Richard. “Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games.” In Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. (2009): 15-25.
Wöhrman, Sebastian, and Nael Ningalei. "The Impact of Sound on Player Experience-A literature study on how players experience the encounter with sound in horror-games." (2018).
Zimbardo, Zara. "„It is Easier to Imagine the Zombie Apocalypse than to Imagine the End of Capitalism”." Censored, edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (2014): 269-294.
Appendix
No generative AI was used in the creation of this paper.