Dead Static Drive Promises Grand Theft Cthulhu, Delivers a Worse Kind of Horror
- After 11 years, Dead Static Drive launches as “Grand Theft Cthulhu” but feels unfinished and barebones despite its eerie 1980s vibe.
- Players report missing sounds, poor structure, and little gameplay depth — surprising for a decade-long project.
- Backed by Epic and Microsoft, the 20-person Reuben Games promises fixes after a rocky Game Pass debut.
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Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
Cthulhu is a cosmic horror that can send people insane, but Dead Static Drive, the new game from Australian studio Reuben Games, has recently launched and is sending gamers mad with a different kind of horror: jank.
Reuben bills it as “Grand Theft Cthulhu” and calls it “a stylized survival-horror road trip set in a nightmare version of 1980s America.” It has gamers drive through a landscape steadily succumbing to cosmic horrors as they scavenge fuel and supplies, on a mission to find the player character’s missing parents.
“Heavily influenced by the work of weird fiction authors T. E. D. Klein, Gene Wolfe, & Ramsey Campbell, filmmaker David Lynch, and photographer William Eggleston, Dead Static Drive hopes to invoke images of an America now lost, where with the right car and enough gas, anything felt possible,” the studio said in a press release.
Unfortunately, the last few days have seen critics and players call out Dead Static Drive for being, well, dead. “The vibes are amazing, don’t get me wrong,” reads one recent player review on Steam. “But so far, it feels like there’s not much game here.”
Eleven Years of Development
Reuben Games’ founder is Mike Blackney, and he first announced Dead Static Drive via a post on Polycount, a game dev forum, in February 2015. The game already had its stylish low-poly look and some basic game mechanics implemented, as he started on it in 2014.
The game received major coverage in 2016 and 2017 but then further updates became sporadic until early 2023, when Blackney announced that Reuben Games had secured funding and support from VicScreen (an Australian creative development agency), Epic Games, and Microsoft. Despite this help, the studio posted on its official X account back in September 2024 that it would miss its slated December 2024 release as “the game’s just not where we want it to be and it’s going to be so much better with more time in the oven.”
Now it’s out, players have expressed surprise that it’s not an Early Access title as it feels unfinished, and lacks a lot of quality of life features and polish people would expect from something that’s been funded by big companies, and took over a decade to make.
“There is no introduction. There is no world building. There are almost no sound effects. Eventually some music kicked in for a few moments until I got out of my car, then it stopped,” reads one negative player review.
“The car has no engine sound. This I have read is a choice made by the devs,” reads another. “I had a good time with it, mostly. I’m curious to see where it goes as I just reached Chapter 1. But I won’t play it for a bit since I might need to refund it.”
“It’s very barebones and lacks structure. Looks like a lot of ideas but not well put together,” reads one of the more succinct negative reviews.
Game Pass And GTA Vibes
Even though the promotional material for Dead Static Drive heavily references Grand Theft Auto, it’s fair to say no one expected something on the level of GTA VI (which itself is facing a lengthy delay). Yet, the fact Dead Static Drive is on Game Pass alongside AAA titles (Black Ops 7 is due to appear on it next week, on Nov. 14) may have set it up for failure as much as Reuben Games’ apparent lack of professional polish.
Part of the reason for this may also well be down to Reuben Games being a small indie studio with around 20 team members. Although their credits thank a bunch of other people, there’s no explicit mention of a QA test department. Despite this, the main devs have been quick to post on social media about bug fixes, clarify some game questions, and promise to add things people expected – like car engine sounds.
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