Cleaning Cars And Packing Boxes: The Fiddly Bits Of Hac

Your car's dirty in a driving game? Press the wipers button. Pssh. Hac makes it charmingly more complicated. You'll also want to press the button to spray water or you might just smear dirt across your windows. And it'll let you get out your car and clean mud off the body with a bucket and sponge. And you might need to top up the wiper water with a bottle which you yourself filled from a tap then packed into your car. It's a fascinating road trip game and I'm delighted by its steady stream of dev blog posts revealing more tiny new interactions. I think you might be too.

(Warning: this post is heaving with animated gifs, so not one for slow computers or connections.)

To briefly explain, Hac will give seven days and seven nights to drive their poorly uncle to the holy land on a pilgrimage. You'll need to pack before setting out, figuring out what you need, what might be useful or fun, and what you have room for. Then you set out on a journey through procedurally generated routes. You could motor on through, but the journey will offer opportunities to stop off and poke around, if you want to. Creator Greg Pryjmachuk explained in a forum post:

The conflict in the game comes in the form of the stop-off points within each route. There should usually be 1-2 stop off points generated in each route. These stop off points, whilst consuming time as a resource, offer unique character interactions, supply collections, car upgrades, collectables and easter-egg opportunities.

I'm trying to catch that "far-out" sense of being on the road. Sort of like when some of the random encounters happened during Fallout 2.

Sounds amazing, doesn't it? With all the tiny interactive bits, gosh, it might be the upcoming game I'm most excited by. Pryjmachuk regularly posts new little animated scenes on his development Tumblr, so let's see what's new since Graham played a prototype in November.

Packing supplies into boxes is pretty fancy:

You fill that water bottle yourself, of course:

And you can pack that box into another box with more stuff:

And then pack that into your car, as space allows:

Do put the toilet seat down before you leave (I'm so happy to see a video game toilet interaction beyond 'flush'):

Pryjmachuk is currently working on the procedural world beyond your apartment block:

Time rolls on as you travel, of course:

Into moody nights:

Down dirty roads:

Wait, now you're just pushing mud around:

That's better:

And this Viscera Cleanup Detail-y washing for the rest of the car:

Is:

Just:

Lovely:

Do follow Hac's Tumblr for regular wonderful updates like all this, and its TIGSource Forums thread often contains more explanation of what you're seeing. Pryjmachuk has released public development builds, but the most recent is from December and is missing lots of these bits. We don't know when it'll be finished and launch, but I am so stoked to get in and start poking at stuff.

I'm still hoping that Magenta Sunset's developer will return to its drive-o-fiddling one day too.