You know the feeling of driving with a song you love turned up, streetlights sliding past, and nowhere you need to be?
Afterglow Interstate is built around that feeling. It's a synthwave motorbike game where the city glows in time with the music, the sun hangs low overhead, and the only thing asking for your attention is the road.
This is where most rides begin, and where a lot of them stay. There's no score or timer, so you can pick a song, settle into a lane and ride towards the setting sun.
Every so often the road has something waiting for you. A ramp might send you up through a line of rings in the sky, or a portal might drop you onto a looping track floating among the stars. Sometimes a helicopter swings in to follow you with its spotlight, at least until you open the throttle and leave it behind.
Every piece of the environment changes with the music and pulses with the beat, with new environments being procedurally created as you travel.
Stay on the road long enough and the skyline starts to thin out. Maybe the towers give way to sand dunes, or the road rises onto a causeway over a sea that glows wherever it meets the shore. Maybe it dips into a tunnel and brings you out into snow, with the northern lights rippling overhead.
There are wind farms whose turbines turn with the tempo, red rock canyons, and a network of tubes where you can ride the walls all the way round. The order is different every time, so it's hard to say what's waiting past the next bend.
The music came first, and everything else was made to follow it. Towers light up on the kick drum, lamp posts pulse down the road one after another, and the song lifts a little as you pick up speed, then settles again when you ease off. When a track starts to build, the traffic builds with it.
The game has its own soundtrack of original synthwave. If you would rather ride to your own music, add it from your PC and the road will learn the beat and adapt the game to the new music.
Some days you might want something to aim for. Flow rewards keeping your speed up and slipping neatly through traffic. Beat lays gates along the rhythm of the song for you to ride through, from Easy for a relaxed run to Hard if you want a real challenge. Echo Race puts a hologram of your best run beside you, and each time you beat it, it waits a little further ahead on your next try.
It's nice to have company on the road. Up to four of you can ride the same song together as glowing holograms. Whoever has ridden furthest when the music ends takes the win. Invite friends through Steam, or jump into a quick match with global matchmaking.
Every ride earns some Chrome to spend in the Garage. Paint the bike candy red or teal pearl, pick your neon, and choose a trail, from a spray of sparks to an oscilloscope that draws the song onto the road behind you. Your echo wears your colours too, and your friends see them whenever you ride together.
We made Afterglow Interstate as a family, to help us deal with some heavy things. It's meant to be somewhere to go when you need a minute, to zone out or unwind. Somewhere to put some music on and give your head a bit of room.
The whole game is built with positive mental health in mind, and it tries to gently remind you that it's okay to not be okay.
