One Way Trip (PS4) Review

“Can’t you trip like I do”

I don’t even know where to begin with this review, which is somewhat appropriate as One Way Trip will probably leave players feeling the same way. Visual novels seem like one of the hardest pieces of gaming media to enjoy, simply because most of it relies heavily on its story elements. That usually IS the entire game, and can make or break it. I will say this: I didn’t enjoy One Way Trip at all, though it does have some interesting things to comment on… I think?

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

One Way Trip has a couple of things going for it that helped me enjoy it to an extent. I say extent because I literally couldn’t finish it. I tried. I played it for a few hours. I couldn’t get into the story or really figure out what was going on in the time I spent with it. I gathered from it, the world is in an odd state, I drank some water that’s toxic, and the news detailed how people were going to slowly start dying in 6 hours with increasing hallucinations. Sounds interesting enough, right?

onewaytrip_02

MSRP: $9.99?
Price I’d Pay: $1.00
Multiplayer: N/A
How long to beat: 3+ hours

The idea of people dying and slowly losing their minds seems to be ripe with unique ideas or enough to keep attention at an all-time high, yet I was constantly bored with the dialog, the over use of foul language, and just a lack of interesting dialog or narrative structure. At one point it switches to another narrative, I think, that involved balancing out if players went to smoke up, play videogames, work on a project, sleep, and well repeats all this over and over again. Yet now we have weird vision or dreams with fruit or other objects talking to the player, progressing this semi interesting yet to me completely captivating story. It switches back to the original characters and then once more to this same set up and I had about enough at this point.

Tripping Balls

A story driven game has to pull you in with its narrative. Failure to do so and players are left with little more than a visual novel experience that just seems to overstay its welcome. I never understood exactly what was transpiring on the screen, and I didn’t care to stick around long enough to find out. It simply wasn’t interesting enough, and I found myself eventually just jamming on the button to see what else I might come across. Nothing that would keep me playing, unfortunately.

onewaytrip_01

Visually it’s very basic and has an ok hand drawn look, with the people looking like they were pictures and drawn over with animated style. The soundtrack has some weird and downright obscure choices of music selection as well, which gave it a unique feel, but it’s not enough to save the experience for me. I turned the game off with a One Way Trip to the delete key. I appreciate what they were going for here, but it wasn’t for me in the slightest.

Favorite moment: The music and visuals def give it a unique feel, that much I can say.

Worst moment: Just realizing something with a unique music and visual style is doing nothing for my interest.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.

Good
  • Visuals
  • Soundtrack
Bad
  • Overuse of foul language
  • Uninteresting
  • Repetitive
3.5
Effortless
Written by
Justin is a long time passionate fan of games, not gaming drama. He loves anything horror related, archaeology inspired adventures, RPG goodness, Dr Pepper, and of course his family. When it comes to crunch time, he is a beast, yet rabies free we promise.