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.