What Car? is a celebration of play through pure creativity, unencumbered by the trappings of narrative logic. Not so wildly surprising What is golf?and it lacks VR immersion What bat?but like the previous two games, it still offers more charm and whimsy than you’ll find in most titles. Why does a car have legs, you ask? Shut up and play.
As we learn What is golf?At Triband Games, the developers specialize in subverting your expectations. So while your main character is indeed a car, you won’t actually be racing on four wheels on boring old tracks. Your car sprouts early legs, which teaches you to expect the unexpected. Each level you play makes the weirdness a little more obvious: You’ll have long legs; you will receive a rocket pack and spring legs; you will turn into a soccer ball.
What a car? it elevates the game’s ideas to the point of absolute absurdity, but that’s what makes it so great. After playing a bit like a soccer ball, several stages turned into massive pinball tables. The game didn’t have to stop and explain the changes or tell me what buttons to press. I noticed that the machine’s motion button rotated the shots and my brain quickly rewired itself around the foosball rules. This experience can be a little unnerving for those unfamiliar with the glories of foosball, but the game effectively uses failure as a teaching tool.
After debuting on Apple Arcade last year, What Car? Now available for PC gamers on Steam. Before you ask, yes, it really does make for the perfect portable Steam Deck experience. Although rich in vibrant aesthetics and cartoon characters, the game does not require advanced graphics hardware. (Its minimum specs? Just a 2.6GHz Intel Quad Core chip, 2GB of RAM, and an 11-year-old GeForce GT 750M mobile GPU.)
Levels for the most part What Car? it’s not too hard, but if you want more challenge, you can try to get gold trophies by completing the stages faster. This root was enough for me to repeat the stages many times. Each stage contains a hidden collectible card as well as other secrets.
Triband Games claims that you can complete What Car?‘s main stages will be completed in three to five hours, with an estimated 9 to 12 more to get all the secrets and gold trophies. Also worth considering are the user-generated levels (most of which are really punishing), as well as a level builder for your own creations.
These days, I often play side-by-side with my five-year-old daughter, Sophia, who has been absolutely amazing for the past few months. Minecraft– stepped. (Is there any kind Minecraft A support group for tired parents who never get in? Someone join me.) He sacrificed some of his limited playing time just to watch me play What Car?. He was thrilled when I managed to hit gold on particularly difficult stages, and he couldn’t stop laughing at the stupid car changes and the damage it would inevitably cause to the bears that inhabit the levels.
I could relate to her sense of dread. With his whimsy and crazy ingenuity, What Car? is proof of the power of games. It’s something I felt at the same age, when I first encountered it Super Mario Bros. On the NES. I didn’t ask why mushrooms make Mario stronger or why I can go down pipes. My daughter never asked why the car has legs, why the rules of the game change. He was just happy to be along for the ride.
