The Road to Hell

Another mile of darkness. Another curve that doesn't end. Another reason to keep driving... Or to finally stop.

Clara has been dead for eleven weeks. The judge wants his summons delivered by nine in the morning. The Old Yungas Road is closed, dangerous, and two hours faster than anything else.

You already know which road you're taking.

THE ROAD TO HELL is an interactive fiction game by Rogerio Biondi set on the real Death Road of Bolivia, a dangerous path three meters wide, six-hundred-meter drops, no barriers, and a history of violence that goes back to the Spanish conquest. You play a process server descending a mountain that has been collecting the dead since the sixteenth century, carrying grief you haven't figured out what to do with and a deadline you can't afford to miss.

The road knows you're hurting. That's the problem.

About the Game

THE ROAD TO HELL is a text adventure in the tradition of the great interactive fiction of the past, built on the PunyInform engine and playable on Z-machine interpreters across modern and classic platforms. It attempts to do something the genre does better than any other: put you alone inside a head that is barely holding together, on a road that is actively trying to finish the job.

The game is heavily inspired by the psychological horror of its setting, the Yungas Road, the 1983 bus disaster that killed dozens of miners, the sixteenth-century massacre of Aymara people during Spanish gold operations, and the particular quality of dread that accumulates in places where people have been dying for five hundred years. The geography is real. The history is real. The rest you will have to decide about for yourself.

Features

• A driving system built from modular text fragments — each DRIVE command assembles a new stretch of road from several possible combinations.
• A sanity and grief system that operates beneath the surface, changing how the world is described and what it chooses to show you. You won't see the numbers. You'll feel them.
• Multiple endings determined by how you solved the puzzles and the condition of the person who arrives at the other end.

Availability

The Road to Hell is currently in development for the following platforms:

Z-machine (Gargoyle, Frotz, Lectrote — Windows, macOS, Linux) Web — playable directly in browser

Classic platform versions planned for later release:

• Commodore Amiga
• ZX Spectrum Next
• MS-DOS
• ZX Spectrum +3
• MSX2
• Commodore 64

Other platform files are provided but not supported.

Gameplay

The game uses standard interactive fiction syntax. DRIVE advances you down the road. LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, and TALK TO work as expected. If something is happening on the road ahead of you — SWERVE, BRAKE, or ACCELERATE. If nothing else works, PRAY.

Content Warnings

Grief and loss. Psychological horror. Road accidents and death. Colonial violence and historical massacre. Supernatural imagery.

Original Release Date 

07 May 2026

Credits

Type VERSION and CREDITS during play to see the current build and contributors.

Legal

The Road to Hell is © 2026 Rogerio Biondi and Loopdigital. All rights reserved.