1-1: Horror Night

Old Factory District

The first thing you’ll do in Sunset Overdrive is select your hero’s face, hair, and body type.

What on earth is happening? Snarling monsters appear to be overrunning the city, and you’re just trying to escape the train station and get home. After exiting the train, you’ll immediately be set upon by some horrible monster. You’ll go through brief tutorials for dodge roll, jumping, vaulting, and bouncing on this burning train platform. Follow the tutorial markers onto the train platform’s canopy and you’ll be able to see your faraway apartment from the top. You’ll also see some truly ghastly, huge creatures, and the highway you’ll have to loft across.

In this introduction, arrows will indicate the paths in the environment you can take with grinding and bouncing. Umbrellas, tops of cars, and upward-facing exhaust fans are all ideal bounce pads, allowing you to cross over hordes of raving monsters below, and swiftly get home to the comfort of a stiff drink and some time to think. (Or maybe just to drink.)

After bouncing on the cars across the highway, you’ll find several rooftops you can traverse between by grinding on cables and a downed antenna. As you’re finally grinding across to your apartment building’s roof, you’ll see one of those extra-huge baddies again, which gives you a chance to become acquainted with reversing directions while grinding. Roll away from the giant mutant first while grinding toward your apartment’s rooftop then again when the giant mutant jumps into your path on the previous rooftop. This places you on your roof, where you’re free to try entering…

Home at last! Well, not quite so fast. The giant mutant catches back up and knocks you away from the roof entry door. Get up, jump and begin undergrinding away from the hulking beast.

While grinding away from the giant mutant pursuing you, you’ll see a friendly citizen waving you down from a rooftop. He has a gun! That could be quite helpful in this chaos, especially if he was to meet an untimely end that led to you being armed. Take a moment to appreciate that would-be Samaritan’s sacrifice by blowing away eight mutants with this blunderbuss. You must be grinding or bouncing during Flaming Compensator blasts in order for the kills to count, but luckily there are ample rails, wires, and ledges here to grind upon.

With eight mutants downed, the giant mutant shows up yet again. Go toe-to-toe with it as best you can, grinding and bouncing to avoid its melee attacks and rock tosses. The giant mutant’s ranged attacks are preceded by a red circle that indicates the impact site. Don’t be there. Blast the giant mutant for a while (or get pummeled by it) and another armed stranger will distract the mutants from a nearby rooftop. With the monsters distracted, you have a clear path to grind and bounce back home!

Rewards

Who Are You?

Who are any of us, really? Complete “Horror Night” and you’ll see what happened that led to this mess. Before the collapse of the city, your hero was a hapless schmo stuck in a dead-end job, wearing a uniform and cleaning up after partying meatheads. Now though, with the events of “Horror Night” irrevocably altering the city and its rules, your hero can be whatever you want. Striking out again 17 days after “Horror Night” (seemingly mostly because you’re out of beer), you can change your outfit and look like anything you please.