YMMV / Highway Blossoms

• Awesome Music: Considering Amber's love of music, it should be no surprise that Highway Blossoms soundtrack has some amazing tunes.
  • Lost With the Wind, the games opening song, a mellow drum and guitar beat that fits the Roadtrip setting perfectly. It's also the favorite song of Amber's grandfather that gets brought up a few times, and gets a slow reprisal during the music festival at the end of the game.
  • Electric Shoehorn, one of two themes for everyone's favorite trio of losers. It's one of the first tracks heard in-game and plays in Mariah's introduction that immediately gets your attention with its melodramatic horns, string section, and guitar riffs.
  • Eleven, a very peaceful and relaxing theme that played during the intimate scenes that Amber and Marina shared together in the main game, and during the couple's reconciliation atop the Stratosphere in Next Exit, will take your breath away.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Amber, whom the creators acknowledge "is a character people tend to either love or hate." Her fans consider her a well-written character who has a genuinely touching relationship with Marina and, while flawed, manages to undergo personal growth over the course of the game. Her detractors consider her too much of a jerk to be likeable, from acting condescending toward Marina to leaving her alone with Jumbo, a man who is planning on making the moves on Marina (in a scene that was later removed from the game).
  • Marina also gets this treatment. To her fans, she's a fun and likeable character, but to her detractors, she's too ditzy and naive for her own good.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In addition to the other problems with Jumbo's scene, it adds practically nothing to the narrative and is never really brought up again, save for a few implicit references to Jumbo later on.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: While everyone, especially Tess herself, agrees that Tess is not normal, no one seems to know whether she has a specific disorder, but fans have some theories. Tess's narrow range of emotions, lack of social skills and intense focus on her hobbies (collecting license plates) could place her on the autism spectrum. Alternatively, her inability to find joy in many things and lack of energy, especially in Next Exit suggests that she might suffer from depression.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Early on in Next Exit, Tess promises Marina that she'll try to feel happier about her birthday. Later on in the DLC, it's revealed that Tess is deeply troubled by her inability to feel happiness or other strong emotions.
• Les Yay: Amber's and Mariah's rivalry/mutual-animosity occasionally veers into this territory. Towards the end of the game, after Mariah ends up helping Amber when she's at her lowest point, Amber even muses that "in another life" Mariah might have been her type. Mariah's tendency to act abrasive, only to grudgingly express sympathy if pressed is a trait she shares with her close companions.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Amber and Marina's interactions are gentle and endearing, with just the right amount of realism to make the reader want to see them open up. The beautiful scenery, laid back tone, fantastic voice acting, and the road adventure premise combine to make a genuinely sweet love story.
• That One Achievement: Desert RV, which require completing the first stretch of the drive in "Extreme" mode. Even after it was fixed, this requires going to and from the convenience store (30 minutes each way), driving until the sun goes down (3 hours) and then sleeping (8 hours), for a total of 12 hours. It's possible to leave the game on standby as the timer counts down, but it's rather tedious.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Next Exit not only uses a Switching P.O.V., but features the option to choose whether to see certain scenes from Amber's POV or Marina's POV. Unfortunately, this only happens twice — an early scene in the RV and the scene in the candy shop — and they're both rather brief.

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