heck
this week i played long road to heck, a 1-to-99 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: by now i've played a hundred games that give you leeway 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 to be generative. it can lend my 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 which objectives are essential and which can be skipped, as well as an efficient order to tackle objectives in. your chosen route should ensure that you're equipped not just to finish subsequent dungeons or beat bosses, but to do it quickly. success demands close engagement with the details of the game's structure in order to make difficult choices between competing needs, based on subjective evaluation
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. this one low-level heuristic seemed to save me from any high-level exclusion or reordering of objectives. structurally the potential exists for more discriminating routing judgments, but it was not necessary to make them.
there's an analogous phenomenon for combat design. long road's relationship with content is hugely maximalist: on top of the wealth of dungeons, there's lots of status ailments, lots of skills, LOTS of gear, lots of gear slots, enemy types, crafting materials—lots of everything. though it would be impossible to engage closely with every single game piece in a single playthrough (even if it lasted 60 hours, which this game's database could easily fill), there are many ways they could be brought into the challenge of reducing my time. i thought barriers might pop up in combat, enemies that took too long to kill or disrupted my habitualbattle plans, requiring me to learn weaknesses, exploit status ailments, rethink my gear choices, or otherwise engage with the present complexity to keep these fights from becoming time sinks.
but once again, long road exerted little pressure toward this type of engagement. classic brute offense sufficed: 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.
so long road to heck didn't really work the way i expected. but it did work. in fact, i really enjoyed it, and i think it's onto something, particularly on the level of moment-to-moment experience. i liked 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 scampering off to the next one. i liked stumbling across a cave or tower i missed, saying fuck it, and sweeping through, hoping the whole time that i was right to gamble on being able to afford it. i liked (this is how an average battle goes) wiping out whole enemy parties in a single round with aoe attacks and gaining two full levels for it. there's a simple truth at play here: it's fun to play an rpg really fast.
that's not the whole truth of long road to heck, but it is the basis of why it works. add to that a few layers of mystery and discovery to gradually peel back and you've got a surprisingly robust adventure for how simple the strategic decision-making is. in the three-ish hours i spent on the game my experience never felt dull, nor did the process, despite the large number of dungeons most of which are just repositories for fights and treasures, became rote. it's no surprise craze knows how to balance a micro-rpg to hold attention and feel good for its whole length. they've been honing their craft since i was in high school. 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 the game 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 can see value in it, 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 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 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.
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.
relevant gaming: 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, and 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