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heck

Recently I played Long Road to Heck, a 1-to-99 slay-the-dark-lord RPG by craze with a 1-hour timer, made for the 2025 RPG Maker Game Jam. I'm really curious about time limits in RPGs: I must have played a hundred games that give you time to "do everything", including grind the challenge out of the game, while the explicit narrative insists on the urgency of your mission. 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 ones like in Long Road, very stressful. I understand this, but I've also found that very stress to be generative. It can lend my choices a lot of weight, the exact kind I'm always excited to feel in RPG decision-making.

The ideal of the time limit RPG engages you in the project of "routing". There's not enough time to do everything you might want to, so you have to decide which objectives are essential and which can be skipped, as well what order to tackle them in. Arriving at your answer involves accumulating knowledge about the game's structure, rules, content, and intricacies, typically across one or more full or partial playthroughs, and applying that knowledge to assess the feasibility of different routing options. You assemble a personal understanding of the game, you identify risks and decide which ones to take on, and put your plan to the test. Most likely it takes a couple tries to perfect, as your plan encounters hiccups along the way and you problem-solve and reassess to mitigate them. Put more succinctly, a good routing game immerses you in the specifics of play.

Long Road gave me plenty of room to skip dungeons or tackle them in flexible order, as expected. But these high-level routing choices were much less crucial to my success than my decision to, as a blanket policy, blaze through every dungeon as fast as possible. In my first run I explored dungeons thoroughly, picked up every treasure I spotted, and ended up timing out several dungeons before the finish line. In my second, I made the decision to ignore wooden treasure chests (containing consumables, which random encounters shower you with as drops) and prioritized metal ones (gear). I skipped one or two of the game's 20 or so dungeons early on, but otherwise gave every area a look just to see what was there, and still finished with 5 minutes to spare. This single, one-size-fits-all heuristic seemed to save me from making rendering finer judgments about which high-level objectives to prioritize, so I never had to consider (say) the particular threats and rewards of attempting this or that dungeon at this or that time.

(Those two low-level dungeons I skipped, I skipped them on the suspicion that I was strong enough to quickly finish the dungeons that followed them, and that they would be of less long-term benefit than higher-level dungeons. This was a satisfying risk to make, and I consider this a success of Long Road's design in the terms I've described. But this process of judgment ended very early, and I never made any such choices again after the first 10 minutes.)

Here's a related phenomenon operating in Long Road's combat design: There's tons of stuff in Long Road to Heck. On top of the wealth of dungeons, there's tons of different status ailments, tons of skills, many tons of gear, tons of gear slots, tons of enemy types, consumable items, crafting materials—tons of everything. Most equipment influences multiple stats. Most skills include secondary effects. This battle system boasts enough volume and complexity of mechanical content to feed a 40 hour epic—and most of those already have more stuff than you know what to do with. In light of Long Road's short runtime, the level of maximalism on display is (if it can be respectfully said) absurd.

The ideal of stuff is that you engage with it in some way. Isn't it? Don't we fill an RPG with all these bits and details because we want them to mean something for the player and their journey? As I watched my arsenal explode over the course of the game, I wondered how I would be asked to bring it to bear. Soon, I thought, I'll run into enemies that attack my runtime, ones that take too long to kill, or resist or disrupt my most relied-on attacks, pressing me to alter my approach, exploit weaknesses, drop status ailments, rethink my gear choices, or otherwise attend to and interpret the present complexity. Obviously it would be impossible to engage closely with every one of Long Road's game pieces, even if the game did last 40 hours. But in the JRPG sphere, even a 10% ratio of signal to noise can make for a standout experience.

And yet no serious pushback ever materialized. None of the differences between enemies really matter. None of this gear provokes a thought past "number go up", and only a couple gear types make number go up enough to fuss about. I plowed through the whole game with barely-calibrated brute force, hammering enemies with single-target physical attacks; then, when I had more MP, with target-all techniques, which would one-shot plenty of foes. Most of my other skills went untouched. Nobody ever got in my way. This colossal mass of stuff evokes a rich possibility space, but just like with the question of routing, the pressure to explore that space was just not there.

So Long Road to Heck didn't really work the way I thought it would. But it did work. My intention is not to castigate an ambitious jam game for not having deep enough play, but to highlight an unexpected avenue of success.

At the same time as I was processing my confusion at not having the plumb the game's depths, I was starting to enjoy flitting over the surface. I liked racing through dungeons, making snap decisions about which paths to follow and which to abandon, raiding a dozen treasure chests, barely stopping to read what I had just picked up, deciding—often arbitrarily—that I had spent long enough here and it was time to move on, and finally warping outside and scampering off to the next location. I liked finding overlooked dungeons on my second playthrough and deciding to cram them into my itinerary, even though I had no idea if I could really afford the time, the need to pay off my spontaneous risks impelling me to go even faster, abandon more chests, skip more paths. I liked spamming enemies to death with AoEs in a single round and gaining two full levels for it, every time. There's a simple truth at play here: it's fun to move through an RPG really fast.

That's not the whole substance of Long Road, but it is the basis of its success. It feels good to go fast. The time limit just gives you an excuse, and the world map, which is always showing you one more, just one more dungeon than you thought you had on your plate, just motivates you to keep pushing yourself, like shoveling coal into a furnace. Despite the game's strategic thinness and its repetitive structure, my experience never felt dull or rote, because the texture of play was inherently pleasant and the drama of the time limit was constantly working. Add a few layers of mystery and discovery for the audience to gradually peel back, and you've got a surprisingly robust adventure for how little the details "matter".

Does the game need all this stuff to work? The hundreds of items and dozens of skills and monsters? Probably not. More stuff means more variables to balance, so in most cases I would expect this kind of excess to be a liability.

But Long Road's balance is, miraculously, just fine. Actually, it feels suspiciously well-calibrated. It's true that I did blow through nearly every enemy party in a single round, but only just. I was never so weak that random encounters could stall my progress, but never so strong that I could take that power for granted and relax: the two outcomes that could break the tension and compromise the drama. It doesn't matter that the threat of falling behind the power curve never materialized, because the constant fear that it might kept me hurrying along in constant anxious motion. That such a deliberate balance was achieved despite the gargantuan number of variables involved is more than a feat—it's a huge flex on the part of a veteran RPG dev who's been honing their design instincts since the 00's. one more paragraph wrapping up the idea that craze is cooking something with this game [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 a way, it gets me to play 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.] maybe a new conclusion - how much of this is important?

What this means for me is that there's a flaw in the way I've been thinking about RPG design.

The critique I expected to make of the unimportance of routing and the excess of barely-significant stuff is one of broken promises. The game sets expectations that you'll have to engage with this stuff on a certain level to succeed. If you don't actually have to, then why is it in the game at all? 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 speed, 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 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.

Further gaming: Compare morso's Pandemony and Majd Rouhana's Excaliburian, two breezy micro-RPGs that also get at the joy of zoomies. Excaliburian was my introduction to this idea, but it didn't click until I played Pandemony, a game that leap at any time with a button press, soaring past obstacles, over rooftops, and even across the overworld. Ripping through pandemony's world like a whirlwind made it click