Rides With Strangers

Rides With Strangers is an indie horror game developed by Reflect Studios.

Plot
You are Elora, a woman rushing to her mother's deathbed. However, on a dark night, while driving down a rural highway, your car breaks down and you are forced to hitch-hike with several strangers.

Gameplay
The entire game is in the first-person perspective, and the player is allowed to roam the rural highway they spawn on as much as they want. The player must stand under a light-post and wait for a car to approach, focusing on them until the eye icon turns green. The Stranger will then come to a halt and offer the player a ride, which they can accept or deny. If they accept, they'll enter the car that soon begins to slowly move to Elora's destination, the distance measured by a blue meter at the top left corner. During the ride, the Stranger will creepily interrogate the player with questions, all the while attempting to kill them, signaled by an eerie stare or a hidden side glance.

The player can counter their attempted attacks by pressing "A", glancing at the Stranger and keeping them at bay, but each glance makes the red sketch meter goes up, and once it's filled, the player can no longer glance, leaving them vulnerable. The player can also keep the Stranger at bay by giving them satisfying answers to their questions. If the player needs to escape, they can tuck and roll out of the car door, but only when the car slows down. The car can be manually sped up by pressing certain speed limit signs, shortening the ride, but this temporarily takes the player's ability to tuck and roll away. A single Stranger can only take Elora so far before dropping her off at a pit-stop, so ultimately she will have to hitchhike with a variety of Strangers regardless of how well she keeps them at bay in her stay with them.

Trivia

 * In the 2016 Reflect Studios horror game Welcome to the Game, on one of the sites (known as Black Hat Post) it is possible to find requests by users, one of them requesting the current location of Elora Silverman, the text being as follows: REQ> Where is the current location of Elora Silverman? Mobile: 212-555-5428 RES> Client, The last known location of this mobile device is as follows: lat: 54.095347 lon: -125.198348. Using this information on a lat/long to map converter will point to a lone road in Burns Lake in British Columbia (Burns Lake, BC V0J 1E3, Canada), meaning that the game takes place in Canada, specifically near Yellowhead Highway. This highway is infamous for a series of misogynistic hitch-hiker crimes known as the Highway of Tears Murders, befitting the game's theme perfectly.