Let me tell you a story.
HIKEBACK
by clown_dream is a short visual novel about trust, self-sabotage, and never-ending cycles. You play as a driver passing through a mountain road late at night, when you spot a hitchhiker flagging you down up ahead. How you proceed from there determines not only the fate of you and the wide-eyed stranger you meet, but your combined fates across multiple planes of existence.
Due to the nature of the game, it is best experienced blind, therefore it is recommended that you play the game first before reading the rest of this page.
This visual novel provides examples of:
- Arc Words: Multiple. "Let me tell you a story.", "It's in my nature.", and "A better ending.", to name a few.
- Animal Motifs: The story is a Twice-Told Tale of the fable 'The Scorpion and The Frog', with Hiker and Driver taking up the roles of the scorpion and the frog respectively. The 'thanks for playing' screen shows a scorpion and a frog looking at the stars together, which is what Hiker and Driver are doing before they die.
- Hiker's braided hair is reminiscent of a scorpion tail.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Driver just has one question for Hiker to answer for them to be freed from being held at gunpoint. "Are you a bad person?"
- Armor-Piercing Response: Hiker asks Driver whose fault it is for their endings. They are surprised to the point of becoming Laughing Mad when Driver responds in one loop that the blame is shared between both of them, for their natures of self-sabotage and self-defense are bound to be in conflict. Having never considered this answer before, Hiker comes to the realization that it is not that bad people lack good thoughts or intentions, but that they choose to ignore it.
- But Thou Must!: Zig-zagged. The characters die no matter which ending you get, they just end up with different bits of insight, and the story of the scorpion and the frog is told differently. As the author puts it in the full endings guide, "You will make a lot of choices in this loop, but only one will determine your ending."
- Crucial Cross: Driver, the 'good' character of the tale, wears a cross necklace.
- Death's Hourglass: The game's arcs are sorted into 'hours', and signified on the title screen/game logo with a clock that ticks down. Of course, after the clock ticks twelve, it is replaced by a glitchy logo, and there are no more roll-backs as Hiker and Driver die one final time.
- The Farmer and the Viper: Played straight in End 1 - Nature. Then discussed and Decon-Recon Switch'd in various other endings.
- Flashback Effects: There is a vignette around the screen when Hiker has flashbacks of his time in the facility that kept him.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The core premise of the story. Hiker gained the power to 'roll-back' time from a mysterious facility, and is using it to reset the day over and over again in hopes that they can break their never-ending cycle of self-sabotage.
- Hard Truth Aesop: Hiker's attempts at looking for a better ending do not end up successful, and in Ending 13 - Tethered, Hiker and Driver come to the conclusion that sometimes it is impossible to break free of a never-ending cycle, and all that you can do is accept it, and try to 'have fun'.
- Nameless Narrative: The characters are either called 'You' and 'Me', or 'Hiker' and 'Driver'. The woman keeping Hiker in a facility for their powers is only referred to as 'Her'. She calls Hiker 'Number 8'.
- Properly Paranoid: Although Hiker is for the most part paranoid and untrusting of Driver unfairly, thinking that it is reasonable to threaten/stab Driver with a scalpel, (though with their own reasons), Ending - 9 and Ending - 10 have Driver out to kill them after getting a Flashforward.
- Screw Destiny: Although Hiker claims that it is their nature to never trust Driver, which leads to their deaths, they continue to roll-back their deaths in search of a 'better ending'.
- Stable Time Loop: Driver gets a memory of killing Hiker before meeting him, and takes it as a sign from God that he was meant to kill them. Then he ends up killing Hiker in the next two loops, which gives him the memory of killing them.
