Gas Snacks & Tears

It's 2026. Five plane tickets cost more than a mortgage payment, so the family vote is unanimous and non-binding: you're driving. Two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, in a 2009 minivan with 190,000 miles and a check engine light that stopped being a warning and became a personality. Gas Snacks & Tears is a deadpan comedy roguelite — a love letter to the trail games you played on a beige computer in 1989, except this time it isn't dysentery that gets you. It's gas station sushi, glowing with possibility. Manage six things, all of which only go down - Gas, Cash, Snacks, Van Condition, Morale, and Phone Battery. - The van makes a new noise. You name it like a pet and keep driving. The family IS the difficulty setting - Dad won't ask for directions — and that quietly closes off your options. - Mom can coupon. The Teen runs on phone battery. The Kid steals snacks and asks "are we there yet" until it does measurable damage. - Grandma keeps a hard-candy reserve and the constitution of a moth. Every stop is a small, informed bad decision - Over 200 hand-written events, each a real trade-off: cash versus morale, time versus risk. - Eat the four-hour-old buffet shrimp to save eight dollars, or don't. The buffet is informed consent. - Outcomes are funny-bad, never unfair-bad. Every death earns one star - Nobody dies of anything heroic. They die of gas station sushi, of a sugar reservoir the size of a toddler, of morale hitting zero somewhere outside Cheyenne. - Each doomed run becomes a roadside memorial — a 1-star review — that shows up on the shoulder of the highway in your next run. Eight ways for it to end - The Perfect Vacation. We Made It... Barely. Portland, But At What Cost. The Van Outlived Us All. Plus a couple you have to earn the hard way. A different doomed road trip every time - Roguelite runs of one to three hours. Pixel art and a CRT you can feel. - Unlock new families and worse vehicles by surviving — or, more often, by not. The sign at the Oregon border says "Welcome to Oregon — Now Go Home." You've come too far to listen.