Nothing enhances the fun factor of a game than one that can make you laugh. It’s even more enticing when the game manages to pull that off consistently. And there’s no better example of a game that does both than developer Triband’s 2023 oddity into motor mayhem, What The Car? And now, PC gamers who missed this award-winning title on Apple Arcade can add it to their Steam library.
What The Car has a simple premise. You are a car with two human legs, eternally being shot out of a cannon. You must reach the finish line after several hundred levels.
What the game doesn’t tell you is that completing these levels won’t be as simple as running towards the finish line as its introduction encourages you to do. Each stage presents a twist on the absurd premise, and these new gimmicks completely change how you play the game. In one instance, your car might now have just two legs, but half a dozen, forming a wheel of limbs you must roll on. In the next, players use a rocket strapped to their rear windshield to jump over gaps in the winding race track that lays ahead.
As the name implies, What The Car is a spiritual successor to 2019’s What The Golf, which similarly presented unpredictable levels. While What The Golf took the age-old gameplay mechanics from series like Hot Shots Golf and Mario Golf and turned them sideways, What The Car does the same with one of gaming’s oldest genres.
Like its predecessor, things get weirder and weirder with each passing level in ways that shouldn’t be spoiled but experienced. Like a long-lost arcade racing game version of Nintendo’s WarioWare series, What The Car frantically ushers players through dozens of absolutely wild ideas, all equally surprising and chuckle-worthy. It’s as if the developers came up with the fairly basic prompt of “what if a racing game, but...,” filled in the blanks with whatever would fit, and built a game around the results.
The game’s presentation is also a delight. The discordant chorus that sings the silly names of each level is as quirky as its premise and never not made me chuckle. Its clean graphics look great even if they’re simplistic enough to run on practically any modern machine. And in between levels players select from its Super Mario-like overworld are these bizarre mini-games. These interstitial levels ditch the racing theme for random video game ideas like catching flies as a weird car-frog hybrid or slicing vegetables as a car-chef.
Don’t let the game’s cartoon-like vibe fool you though. It will quickly present a challenge once things get going, especially for players looking to earn a three-star rating on each course. Extra difficult secret levels also give players another way to prove their mastery of the ever-evolving sentient car.
If you manage to beat the critical path of What The Car the journey doesn’t have to be over yet. There’s a level editor included in the game, and players can share those levels with the world. There are virtually endless custom courses available, and it’s a joy to see how inventive the community can be with the Triband’s toolset at their disposal.
What The Car is a side-splitting romp of a game that is simple to get into and endlessly replayable. Its continuous stream of new ideas is genuinely worth running through to completion at least once. And not that it’s no longer exclusive to Apple’s line of mobile devices, there’s little reason to miss this charming take on one of gaming’s oldest genres.
