heck
this week i played long road to heck, a short rpg by craze with a 1-hour timer, made for the 2025 rpg maker game jam. i'm always really curious about time stress in rpgs, having grown a little tired of the way games give you space to "do everything", including grind away the challenge, while the explicit narrative asserts a sense of urgency. the more it happens, the more the incongruity grates on me... limiting the number of amount of time (real or mechanical) the player has to perform actions is a natural way to align mechanical and narrative urgency, but a rare device in practice. presumably this has to do with audiences finding time limits, especially global time limits, very stressful. i understand this, but i find that very stress is generative. it gives your choices a lot of weight, the exact kind i'm always excited to get from rpgs decision-making.
the ideal of the time limit rpg asks you to consider "routing". there's not enough time to do everything you might want to, so you have to decide what's essential and what can be skipped, and what the most efficient order to tackle objectives is, ensuring that you're equipped not just to finish dungeons or beat bosses, but to do it quickly. long road asked me to make a few routing decisions, but these were ultimately less critical than the way i navigated dungeons internally. in my first run i explored dungeons thoroughly and picked up every treasure i spotted, and ended up timing out several dungeons before the finish line. in my second, i ignored wooden treasure chest (containing consumables) and prioritized metal and gold ones (gear and key items), and had enough time to poke around every dungeon as i encountered them and still finish with 5 minutes to spare. structurally the potential exists for more discriminating routing judgments, but it was not necessary to make them.
an analogous phenomenon in combat design: this game is hugely maximalist. there's lots of status ailments, lots of skills, TONS of gear, lots of gear, slots, enemy types, crafting materials, lots of everything. you can picture a version of the game where, in order to shave your time down, you need to learn enemy weaknesses, exploit status ailments, prepare for known threats, and use the breadth of your toolset to blaze the fastest trail through the challenges before you. the vision is clear.
but once again, the pressure doesn't exist. in long road, classic brute offense sufficed for me: early on i hammered enemies with my best single-target physical attacks. later, when i had more mp, i spammed target-all spells and tactics, many of which would one-shot regular enemies. of the dozen or two abilities available to each character, i didn't use more than 4 or 5 per, most of them straight damage skills. that's a decent number of useful abilities per character, but it also leaves an enormous number i never had a reason to consider using. of a character's 10-ish gear slots, only ~3 per character will have a noticeable impact on play, the rest can plausibly lie empty the whole game without being noticed. the specifics of enemies went unnoticed, besides when i happened to hit an elemental weakness, which was a sign to keep doing what i was doing. in short, i had little need to engage with the enormous complexity that the game provided and endlessly called attention to. as with the question of routing, the simplest and most obvious approach overshadowed everything else.
games is a common rpg complaint, but in the ca but in this case i'm not sure long road is actually fai i mostly think long road to heck works and despite some reservations i really enjoyed the moment to moment experience of playing it. i like racing through dungeons, making snap decisions about which paths to follow and which to abandon, snatching up treasures as fast as i can and warping out and moving onto the next one. it's fun to (this is how an average battle goes) wipe out whole enemy parties in a single round with aoe attacks and gain two full levels for it. it's fun to play an rpg really fast! add to that a few layers of mystery and discovery to gradually peel back and you've got a surprisingly robust experience. in the three-ish hours i spent on the game my experience never dulled or, despite the large number of dungeons most of which are just repositories for fights and treasures, became rote. i'm not surprised craze knows how to balance a micro-rpg to hold attention and feel good for its whole length, they've been plying their trade since i was a kid. what makes it an insane feeling feat is that they've done it while having mind-boggling levels of "database content", hundreds more variables to account for than the game strictly "needs". from this angle it feels like a massive flex on craze's part
the critique i expected to make of the unimportance of routing and the excess of barely-significant Stuff is one of broken promises: that it sets expectations that you'll have to engage with this stuff on a certain level to succeed, and that if you don't, then you wonder why it's in the game at all. this is an old problem for rpgs of course, it's the most final fantasy thing in the world to have 100s of spells and consumables you never touch and it has been for 30 years. i think it has value, aesthetically and mechanically, so i don't really want to make a blanket condemnation of excess. but i wonder what it does for the game to have so much noise in it and never have to sort through it. wouldn't it have been so much simpler, so much easier, to have 50% as many pieces of gear but make them 200% more important? wouldn't balancing a smaller number of items (spells, monsters, dungeons, whatever) make for less developer overhead, freeing up energy that could go toward making more specific, intimate experiences? ones where routing and learning how to deal with enemies and make the most of all your buffs and elemental shields actually matter?
i think of that as the commonsense approach, but obviously it would produce a very different experience. the kind i would make: slow, deliberate, asking you to pay a lot of attention and think carefully about your choices because they all carry a lot of weight. long road to heck is, despite the time limit, and to my surprise, sort of a weightless game. but in the absence of that weight it becomes (again, surprising me) much easier to see the inherent pleasure of going really fast, which is what's really at the center of my experience. it's enough (both for the game and for me) just to go fast. the role of the timer here isn't to constrain my actions and force me to be more deliberate, but to keep me in constant motion, to let go of the little treasures that lie down branching paths that i was never going to use anyway, to release my risk-averse anxieties and just trust that a brazen offensive will work out (it usually does). in short i'm playing the way i often wish i was when playing longform rpgs, but without the sour, dissatisfied feeling i get when i actually try to skip over stuff.
the lesson here for me is that as much as i love to intellectualize about play and drama and setups and payoffs and tension and release, there are simpler pleasures to be found too. time limit rpgs, it turns out, can do both! if i make a time limit rpg that's just about the serious business of reconnaissance and planning and high-stakes judgment, without at least considering the joys of scurrying, shooting wildly, and embracing faith and uncertainty, then i'm limiting my imagination and my work will be poorer for it.