Boiling Point: Road To Hell, one of the most delightfully buggy games ever, returns this month

Opinions vary on whether 2005’s Boiling Point: Road To Hell was ever, could ever have been, a good game. What’s clear is that it was interesting, both as an early example of an open-world RPG and as an infamously broken example of Eurojank. Now it’s getting a re-release in just ten days and I’m fascinated to know whether a Boiling Point with fewer bugs has anything to offer the world in 2023.

Here’s a trailer:

The size of Boiling Point was core to its appeal. Set in a 25km square chunk of land, you could wander – and drive! – around a fictional South American country in search of your kidnapped daughter. Along the way you could chat to the locals and do jobs for six different factions, with a reputation system meaning that the nation’s government wouldn’t be too fond of you if you did jobs for the guerillas, the CIA not too fond of you if you did jobs for the government, and so on.

It’s real claim-to-fame though is its bugs; not just that there were lots of them, but that they were unusual, often delightful. Here’s a list of patch notes from Boiling Point’s first update, almost twenty years ago:

• fixed: the snake wasn’t able to bite you while you were crawling;
• fixed: size of the moon;
• fixed: posters in bar vanish as you turn away from them;
• fixed: dog does not cast shadows;
• fixed: a metal clanking sound plays, if the user’s character stabs the curtains;
• fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level;
• fixed: npc die on contact with grenades, and not from the actual explosion

“Fixed: size of the moon” is poetry and has been lodged in my brain ever since.

This re-release promises “major improvements to the game’s stability”, though there’s little specific detail about what is fixed or what features it might have to make it run better on modern machines or in modern resolutions. Not that I’m sure that fixing Boiling Point would leave you with anything other than an old, sorta-empty game with a lot of crap shooting in it.

Boiling Point: Road To Hell will launch on Steam and GOG on November 14th.