Expeditions: A MudRunner Game

Man (and Truck) vs. Nature (and Ghosts)

Have you ever been driving at night through country lanes? Cowering behind the wheel from looming, pale branches and convinced of glowing eyes watching from hedgerows? Have you ever seen hunched figures in the distance only to realise it was actually a road sign, or been shocked by the sudden emergence of a wayward owl? SnowRunner has that feeling in spades. I mean, I haven’t noticed any owls, but there are definitely glowing eyes watching from the undergrowth.

If I was writing a script for a YouTube video about non-horror games that have spooky bits in them, SnowRunner would be on it. The aforementioned glowing eyes are the obvious example, but there’s other stuff too, like spooky singing coming from abandoned churches, abandoned villages that are apparently irradiated, and just a general feeling of isolated creepiness once the sun disappears behind that distant ridge of trees.

You want me to go that way, eh? Should I trust this fellow? 

There are also trucks in it, big trucks. That’s what the MudRunner/SnowRunner/Spintires games are, by the way; slide into the driver’s seat of a massive truck with vast tyres and chunky metal bits, and smash it into nature. Take on a task, like delivering cargo or finding a broken down truck in the wilderness, and face puddles of sticky mud, fallen trees, swamps, muck, rocks, and dangerous slopes as you try to get from A to B. You will get stuck, but with careful use of your winch, gears, variable tyre pressures, and possibly other vehicles in your fleet, you’ll get satisfyingly unstuck and be able to move on to the next helping of nigh-impassable terrain.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is, at the time of writing, the most recent title in the franchise, and eschews the “odd-job guy in rural, isolated locations” feel in favour of an “adventurous type in the literal middle of nowhere” kind of vibe. Most of the massive hardware is gone, with a new focus on “scout” type vehicles, there are no towns, paved roads, or permanent residences around, the player can make use of a drone to scout out the landscape, and most of the missions will be quests of discovery, looking for dinosaur bones or evidence of prehistoric civilisations.

That’s where this game’s weirdness comes in. I’ve not gotten too far yet, but Expeditions: A MudRunner Game feels even more isolated than its predecessors, and many of the missions will send you searching for little statues of odd-looking fellows that seem to point out the direction of safe routes. This paints them in a benevolent light, but they still strike me as kind of creepy. Also, the ones in the desert levels have oars. What are they doing with oars in deserts, eh? Something to do with the large, abundant rivers nearby, you say? A likely story.

I was doing okay until you lot stuck your oar in.

I got lost in Expeditions: A MudRunner Game at first, and I don’t just mean I rolled my truck down a ravine and didn’t know the way back to base. The missions aren’t clear, the controls take some getting used to, and the menus aren’t the most intuitive. I was lost at the beginning of SnowRunner, too, but it wasn’t long before I got out of first gear. The same thing happened here, and I was soon charging up rocky hillsides with wild abandon, and only toppling back down again about half the time.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is for those players who preferred the exploration and scouting aspect of SnowRunner and MudRunner, but I must admit that I was mostly happiest when I was hauling cargo along a busted up road with gigantic, muddy swamps along the way, so Expeditions doesn’t scratch that same itch. It’s still kind of spooky though, and I’ve seen posts online about ghosts and bears and UFOs, so who knows what I’ve yet to uncover. I’ll let you know if I find anything in the wilds.

Just what else could be out there?

Played on PS5