Death Road to Canada

Death Road to Canada is a Randomly Generated Road Trip Simulator built around a zombie apocalypse. You control and manage a car full of jerks as they explore cities, recruit weird people, argue with each other, rescue dogs, and face gigantic swarms of slow zombies on their way from Florida to Ontario. Every playthrough generates a different story across a world that does not take itself too seriously.

Replay value is the design's signature. Locations, events, survivor appearances and personalities are all randomized. Up to 500 zombies can hunt you down at a time during combat encounters, and you decide whether to fight them, squirm past, or run. Interactive Fiction events scattered through the trip present tough choices, with different options and results based on the traits of your party members. Some survivors are stronger if they're throwing chairs; others are stronger if they're throwing sofas.

The character creator lets you put yourself, friends, and family in the game. Customize their appearance, traits and stats — and then watch them show up at random during other people's playthroughs to get eaten. The community of player-made characters appearing in randomized runs is one of the funnier emergent features of the design.

Gameplay covers special and rare events, weapons, and characters with strange abilities — including the genuine ability to teach a dog how to drive a car. The genre's claim to being family-friendly is mostly accurate: gore explosions are stylized in a cute pixel-art aesthetic, and the writing censors one specific word (the developers will note that 'dingus' becomes 'd*ngus' once). Tell people to 'Cool it.' Four-player local same-screen co-op lets up to four humans share the road trip across multiple controllable characters. It's one of the more affectionate genre-spoof road-trip games on Steam.