‘From the publisher of Jalopy!’ goes the spiel in the latest trailer from Excalibur Games for Road to Guangdong. It’s easy to see why: Road to Guangdong has a lot in common with Minskworks’ Jalopy, at least in the looks department. Both games share a similarly artistic, lo-fi approach to their visuals, and in their own way, both games look great. But delve a little deeper into Road to Guangdong and you begin to see that the content is rather different.
Jalopy sees the player fixing together an engine of a beat up old car, and is faced with driving that beat up old car across country, repairing parts as they break. While there are elements of this in Road to Guangdong, that is far from the core gameplay experience. Okay, so there’s car maintenance, and you need to ensure that your vehicle is working. If parts break down, they can be fixed at garages along the way, but you don’t need to personally fix it — that is down to the game to do for you.
What Road to Guangdong brings to the table is people. Jalopy can be a very lonesome experience, travelling through the world, seeing scant few people and interacting with even fewer. Road to Guangdong has you on a road-trip with your elderly Aunt Guu Ma, and your relationship with this character is explored as you travel across the country to open a restaurant.
The aim of the driving sections, much like Jalopy, is to mimic the feeling of realistically driving long distances, but without having to physically do so. Driving levels last only minutes, but feel much longer, as you drive along motorways to reach the next step of the journey.
The journey is broken up by a number of stops to various garages for repairs and fuel. There is a chance here for some interaction with Guu Ma and it is the breaks in the journey that really show Guangdong’s true colours as these are the times you learn more about its story.
During the demo, you stop off at Sum Suk’s Kung Fu School, where you learn that the lead character Sunny trained there as a child some years ago. Road to Guangdong has basic conversation options, allowing you to ask characters different questions. It also allows you to discover secrets, which gives you access to ‘secret’ conversation options.
These options seem to work toward building connections that bridge the generational gap between Sunny and Guu Ma. This cross country trip could be the thing that connects these two individuals who struggle to see eye to eye due to the differences between modern China and its past.
From the off, Road to Guangdong looked like it was going to be very similar to Jalopy, a road-trip survival title, if you like. But from my short time with the game I can easily see that this is going to be a more personal and perhaps deeper game than its publisher stablemate.
Road to Guangdong is due to hit early access on Steam on 16th of May. Preview code supplied by publisher.
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