What the Car? is a celebration of gaming through pure creativity, unfettered by the trappings of narrative logic. It isn’t as wildly surprising as What the Golf?, and it doesn’t have the VR immersion of What the Bat?, but like those previous two games, it still delivers more charm and whimsy than you’ll see in most other titles. Why does the car have legs, you ask? Shut up and play.
As we learned from What the Golf?, the developers at Triband Games specialize in subverting your expectations. So while your main character is indeed a car, you won’t actually be racing on four wheels over boring old tracks. Your car sprouts legs early on, and that alone teaches you to expect the unexpected. Every level you play twists the weirdness a bit further: You’ll get long legs; you’ll get a rocket pack and springy legs; you’ll be transformed into a soccer ball.
What the Car? escalates its gameplay ideas to levels of sheer absurdity, but that’s what makes it so great. After playing as a soccer ball for a bit, a few stages transformed into massive foosball tables. The game didn’t need to pause and explain the changes or tell me which buttons to press. I intuited that the car’s action button flipped the kickers, and my brain quickly remapped itself around foosball rules. This experience might be a little frustrating for those unfamiliar with the glory of tabletop soccer, but the game effectively uses failure as a teaching tool.
After debuting on Apple Arcade last year, What the Car? is now available to PC players on Steam. And before you ask, yes, it does make for a truly perfect portable Steam Deck experience. While it’s lush with a vivacious aesthetic and cartoonish characters, the game doesn’t require advanced graphics hardware. (Its minimum specs? A mere 2.6GHz Intel Quad Core chip, 2GB of RAM and an 11-year-old GeForce GT 750M mobile GPU.)
For the most part, levels in What the Car? aren’t too difficult, but if you want more of a challenge you can try to get gold trophies by completing stages faster. That carrot was enough to make me replay stages multiple times. There’s also a hidden collectible card in every stage, as well as other secrets.
While Triband Games claims you’ll be able to complete What the Car?’s core stages in three to five hours, it estimates it’ll take another nine to 12 to get all of the secrets and gold trophies. There are also user-generated levels to consider (most of which are truly punishing), as well as a level builder for your own creations.
These days, I’m often playing games side-by-side with my five year old daughter Sophia, who in the past few months has become absolutely Minecraft-pilled. (Is there some sort of Minecraft support group for tired parents who never got into it? Someone please hook me up.) She ended up sacrificing some of her limited gaming time just to watch me play What the Car?. She was thrilled when I was able to reach gold on particularly tough stages, and she couldn’t stop laughing at the car’s silly transformations and the damage it would inevitably inflict on bears populating the levels.
I could relate to her sense of awe. Through its whimsy and delirious inventiveness, What the Car? is a testament to the power of games. It’s something I felt at the same age, when I first encountered Super Marios Bros. on the NES. I didn’t question why mushrooms made Mario get stronger, or why I could go down pipes. My daughter never questioned why the car had legs, or why the rules of the game kept changing. She was just thrilled to be along for the ride.
