Asphalt Among Ashes is a game by Andrea Duarte
https://kipplekipp.itch.io/asphalt-among-ashes
What follows is some play:
The vehicle is a road train, a squared off double wide, built to barely fit under any bridges in the area, when there were bridges in the area. The cabin is high and it's windows wrap around. The body is in good shape, only from careful repairs. Whether an inch of original sheathing remains, is a negative not to pursue disproving. The outside is kept a slightly iridescent blue, the inside show's it's patchwork nature. The glass is harder to maintain, nothing the like has been made in almost as long and spares ran out soon after. It has been replaced with layering of mesh painted black. Fine grid on the outside, larger and more robust grid on the inside. Appearing from a distance as a reasonable facsimile of the original windscreen. The airflow helps to make up for the long dead AC unit.
What trails is four box trailers, following the block profile perfectly, but likewise a fabrication of the original style. These trailers are false skins meant to obscure their contents, which could be anything from tankers to tanks, often grain, water.
This train doesn't hide, it sticks out glaringly, with it's blue head and silver cars. It expects to be seen and recognized, like a poisonous frog. The cabin does though. Painted all black, upholstered black, black uniform, to aid in the illusion of the windscreen and protect the driver from being targeted.
Settlements often find stability in places just next to the end they narrowly survived. This one is in the suburb of a city that was hit. All highways pass through the city center, thankfully calmed. Vines the size of roads, trees the size of lakes, ripped through the buildings, the streets, the river, like the anger of nature itself, but of course always the anger of man. This highway was spared a lot of damage, largely repaired, cleared, or bypassed. In places the trees have ripped entire office buildings from the ground, and hoist them in the sky. It's not uncommon for these buildings to structurally fail and fall, even after decades in the air, few remain.
They have become an icon. People climb the trees, climb into the off kilter buildings, and tie ribbons to the windows. Longer the better, but they fray in the years. Red in the shade, bleached in the sun, a trial for the young and the angry, a monument for the lost. A mat of ribbons trails from what buildings remain, the oldest bone white, threadbare.
As the city fades into outlying suburbs, buildings far less suited to abandonment, sightlines grow, and the sky tints red into sunset. Periodically there are still masonry and cement buildings, often with lights, and figures, lookouts. One comes upon that lies adjacent to the highway. Many rooms lit, many people in each, silhouetted at the window. A statement to the road, you are seen here. As the train passes, a flare goes up, green and blue, outbound without issue. Lit towers to the horizon launch flares in cascade, white and blue, acknowledged. A tower among the vines behind puts spotlights on a pair of buildings, visible from far, white and blue. From here the buildings are much less common, and keep their lights off.
Outside the city used to be a great blanket of farmland, feeding everyone with corn, wheat, other things. The farms are dead and dry, their fertile soils long blown away, but here in particular a great root has cracked the land and formed something akin to a mountain range. It would be hundreds of miles over unstable fields to go around. A path has been cut, long ago, but it's difficult and only so much more steady. Navigating the train across it is a trial, and every time it seems to have drifted. With winch and board, the cars pull through. Maybe next time it will have been improved. If they value this trade route they'd shore it, but they never have.
The miles drag on, the tens, the hundreds. Highway hypnosis was a problem with early highways. Driving in a straight line for hours, you lose a sense of speed, time, distance, and accelerate. They quickly altered designs to feature frequent sweeping curves, minimizing distance covered in straight lines. While that's less of a problem on this route, no speed limits, driving flat out most of the way; sometimes you start to see things. On the horizon, in places there are no places, perhaps a spire, coming, you think, to a point. Begging investigation, it couldn't be too far out of the way
It doesn't come any closer, traveling for hours on the wrong highway. To be so far, to be so tall, it'd reach the moon, surely. The moon, behind it, by happenstance, surely. You might like to go to the moon, you think. People used to do that, go to the moon. You're people. You hear a noise, look away, look back, look for the noise, look again, it's tomorrow, you've driven through the night, you're hundreds of miles off course, the noise is your map fluttering in the wind. You look back, where were you going? You need a new route, there's a highway crossing ahead, heading back where you should be