You are a sentient Car with a face and legs. Your friends – and fans – are a large number of talking bears who have made up a bunch of challenges for you to complete. What sort of challenges? Well, racing challenges, but not exactly. If you’ve played either of developer and publisher Triband’s other What The X? games, the sheer unabashed weirdness of this premise will not surprise you. Their first outing, What The Golf? saw you playing as a golf ball – except when you weren’t, which was often – exploring the remains of a scientific laboratory studying golf and how to make it more exciting. What the Bat?, a VR game, is equally bizarre. So when I say that you are engaging in racing challenges, know that basically nothing will be like in a regular racing game, except for the idea that you’re trying to set a quick time from start to finish.
What The Car? does not have much of anything in the way of a plot to get in the way of its absurdist premise and I think this is for the best. Rather than wasting time trying to justify basically anything going on, it matter of factly presents something absurd, lets you process that, and then ups the ante. It does this from the very start with a short cut scene that introduces you to the car, the fact that car will do things like spontaneously grow legs after its wheels fall off, and that bears are making challenges for the car, and off you go to a quick footrace. Another cutscene sells the idea that the car changes in even more bizarre ways, a few more races to show you what that’s like in practice and you’re off into the hub world knowing basically everything you need to know to get started with all the unique and unusual races What The Car? is going to throw at you.
Each Episode – or hub world – starts with a locked gate, and paths leading away from that gate. On those paths are levels. Completing a level at all will allow you to progress further along the path, but you are encouraged to try and get a gold crown time on each stage, as well as its hidden card. When you complete the level, whether or not you got the card as well as the best rank time you’ve gotten will be displayed on the level in the hub. In addition to the main paths you need to complete a stage, the hub worlds will also have optional side content, like side quests in the hub world itself, levels that are somewhat tangentially related to the theme of the world, player made levels, and the skull levels – usually the hardest levels of a given episode, which often but not always involve unique twists or extra challenging forms of levels elsewhere in a stage. Once you complete a main line of levels, you come across a generator and follow the line of levels back to the initial locked gate and one of its lights will change color. Complete all the level lines, change all the lights and you can access the chest inside to find a bear in a costume who will unlock the next episode, which will be themed around that bear’s costume in some way, like the bear wearing a jersey with a foam finger unlocks the sports themed levels.
On the hub world, you can steer your car left and right, and go by pressing a button. Once you’re in a level, you usually start it by firing yourself out of a cannon during which time the game will slow down and announce the name and thus theme of the level, and usually you’ll be able to steer the car and make it run forward with the same movement button, only now the car will also usually slowly accelerate to a top speed, and it can skid in corners. I say usually a lot on there because the game likes to change up the rules on you by changing the nature of the car and how it moves, which is a perfect segue into discussing the actual levels. If you played What the Golf? you probably won’t be too surprised when I say that while there are plenty of legitimate racing levels, there are also levels that are just plain bizarre. To start, you are already a car with legs. In one level your legs don’t work but you have a rocket booster. In another the finish line is running away from you. In another you are covered in springs and automatically bounce any time you hit the ground and you need to use a jetpack in order to time and space your bounces to avoid falling off the course entirely. There are levels where you can only move by firing a cannon. And so on. There are 10 episodes in the game, and most all of them have 20 or so levels, so don’t worry about running out of challenges any time soon, even before you get into the bevy of user made levels, because yes, there is a level editor, and yes, you can upload your own levels and yes, they’re even more unhinged than the developer levels.
There’s lots of fun sound effects in What The Car?, and plenty of fanfares for completing a level or finding an in-game trophy, but there’s actually very little in the way of music. Most levels use the same theme, a chill tune that occasionally repeats “What the… caarr” every few beats so as not to get in the way of your focus on whatever strange level you’re in right now.
What The Car? is absurd, inane, and insane. I love it. I love that it doesn’t even try and justify its absurd premise because it needs no justification, it just needs to provide me with a trunk full of of unhinged car and car-adjacent challenges, and it has. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the nonsense this game gets up to with its challenges, and I strongly recommend everyone give it a shot.
Tim played What the Car? on PC with a review code.
