HELLGRADE

HELLGRADE is a stunt car race down a mountain, in the spirit of the 1989 classic Stunt Car Racer.

You sit in the cockpit of a blown V8 stunt buggy at the mine head under Old Baldy. Half the way down is the old mine's timber track: planks on trestles high over the gulches, with nothing at the edges to stop you. The rest is rock-lined mountain road. The course climbs as well as falls as it winds round the peaks, and every course brings something new: wall rides, a crossing and a tunnel, a loop-the-loop, a corkscrew, a runaway ore train, the night, a double gap, a cliff ledge, and a last course with all of it at once in the dark.

• Twelve courses on four mountains, with bronze, silver and gold times. Bronze opens the next course; bronze on a mountain's three opens the next mountain.
• A car you feel: springs you can see working, brakes that fade on a long descent, a boost you top up at checkpoints, and a wreck in slow motion when you leave the road at speed, bits flying.
• Three events on every course, each with its own medals: the time trial, with the ghost of your best run beside you, then a bike race and a car race against a rival.
• Everything is flat-shaded vector 3D with a CRT finish: no sprites, no textures. The car's sounds are IndieSFX's; the rest, and the music, are synthesised in code.

Pay what you want. The whole game is free to download. If you enjoy it and want to put something towards the next one, thank you. If not, that's fine too: this is a hobby, made for the love of it.

What's in it: all four mountains, Old Baldy, The Widowmaker, The Furnace and Devil's Backbone, and their twelve courses. It's still in development, so new builds go up here as it grows, and the itch.io app keeps you up to date.

Please note: HELLGRADE is under active development, so it is subject to change and may not reflect its final form.

Controls: keyboard or gamepad (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Steam Deck); every control can be rebound, and a pad the game doesn't know can be set up from the Options.

Installing: with the itch.io app, install from your library and it keeps itself up to date. From the browser, download the zip for your system, unpack it anywhere and run HELLGRADE.exe (Windows) or HELLGRADE (Linux). On Windows, if "Windows protected your PC" appears, choose More info, then Run anyway: the game isn't code-signed yet.

System requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), or 64-bit Linux from about 2018 on. The 3D is drawn by OpenGL 3.3, which any graphics chip from about 2010 on has, including laptop integrated graphics and the Steam Deck.

If it crashes: the game saves a crash report and says where. Please post the newest crash-....txt and hellgrade.log in the comments, with what you were doing.

Feedback: if there's a feature you'd like, you have a suggestion, or a build gives you trouble, leave a comment below. Feedback is always welcome.

About Hidden Line Games: Hidden Line Games is one person, making old-school vector games as a hobby, for the love of it: lines, flat polygons and a CRT glow, the way games looked in 1988. Also on itch.io: VECTORBORNE, a VTOL flight game against a rogue AI (pay what you want), LOWLINE, a stealth strike flown low at night (coming soon), and GRAVELINE, a turtle base builder set on the Western Front (very early work). Follow along on Bluesky: @xrouter.bsky.social. Updates go there and to this page's devlog.

Credits: With thanks to this amazing creator:

• IndieSFX (Mark Sheeky): HELLGRADE's car sounds. S017C Car Sounds, bought by Hidden Line Games on 22 October 2026. indiesfx.itch.io, indiesfx.co.uk, @indiesfx.bsky.social on Bluesky

Every pack was paid for on itch.io, from the studio's account, Hidden Line Games, or my own, xrouter. Everything else, the pictures, the other sounds and the music, is drawn and synthesised by the game's own code.