What the Car? is a game that celebrates gaming through pure creativity, without being bound by narrative logic. It doesn’t have the wow factor of What the Golf? or the VR immersion of What the Bat?, but like its two predecessors, it’s more engaging and quirky than most other titles. You might be wondering why a car has legs, but just shut up and play.
As we learned from What the Golf?, the developers at Triband Games specialize in subverting player expectations. While the main character is indeed a car, it doesn’t race on four wheels around boring old tracks. Early on, the car grows legs, which only makes it more unexpected. With each level you play, it gets a little weirder: it sprouts long legs, gets a rocket pack and bouncy legs, or transforms into a soccer ball.
What the Car? escalates gameplay ideas to the level of sheer absurdity, but that’s what makes it so great. After playing as a soccer ball for a while, several levels transformed into giant foosball tables. The game didn’t have to pause to explain the change or tell me which button to press. I intuited that the car action button flipped the kicker, and my brain immediately reconstructed the rules of foosball. The experience may be a bit frustrating for those unfamiliar with the awesomeness of tabletop soccer, but the game effectively uses failure as a teaching tool.
What the Car?, which debuted on Apple Arcade last year, is now available to PC players on Steam. And before you ask, the game really does offer the perfect portable Steam Deck experience. Though it’s packed with vibrant aesthetics and cartoony characters, the game doesn’t require advanced graphics hardware (the minimum specs? Just a 2.6GHz Intel Quad Core chip, 2GB of RAM, and an 11-year-old GeForce GT 750M mobile GPU).
Tri-Band
Most of the levels in What the Car? aren’t too difficult, but if you want more of a challenge you can complete the stages quickly to earn a gold trophy. This reward was enough to make me want to play the levels over and over again. Each stage also has a hidden collectible card, along with other secrets.
Triband Games claims that the core stage of What the Car? can be completed in 3-5 hours, but estimates that it will take an additional 9-12 hours to get all the secrets and gold trophies, and that’s before you factor in user-created levels (most of which are downright tough) as well as a level builder for creating your own creations.
Tri-Band
Lately, I’ve been spending more time gaming alongside my 5-year-old daughter, Sophia, who has become completely addicted to Minecraft over the past few months. (Is there some kind of Minecraft support group for exhausted parents who just can’t get enough of Minecraft? Someone help me out.) My daughter sacrificed her limited game time just to watch me play What the Car?, ecstatic when I managed to reach gold level on a particularly difficult level, then giggling at the funny ways the car would deform and the damage it inevitably caused to the level’s inhabitant bears.
I could empathize with my daughter’s awe. Through its quirkiness and fanatical inventiveness, What the Car? is a testament to the power of games, the way I felt when I was that age and first discovered Super Mario Bros. on the NES. I never wondered why eating mushrooms made Mario stronger or why he could fly through pipes. My daughter never wondered why cars had legs or why the rules of the game kept changing. She was just excited to ride along.
