Parking Garage Rally Circuit
I think if you ask people about the “essence of rally”, once you’ve filtered out the “what the fuck are you talking about"s, you’ll get some pretty diverse answers; like all disciplines worth your attention, it’s multifaceted. But I think it makes some sense that the JellyCar guy would decide “the essence of rally is hitting a small elevation change and fucking dying”.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit pairs The Philosophy Of Die with snappy kart-racer drifts and uncapped boost speed, and the result feels like it’s of two worlds—sharp, technical handling with unexpected lightning-bolts of comedy/cruelty. Apply power at your peril; if you don’t have all four wheels on the ground, hitting the accelerator is liable to send all four of those wheels directly to hell, tumbling end over end in a pirouetting gymnastics routine while your tires find grip on everything but the road.
It’s a time-attack game, even if the short campaign frames chasing par times as a “race” (and even if there’s serviceable no-collide multiplayer). But it’s not the kind where sub-micron adjustments reward you with sub-millisecond improvements; it’s the kind where you fight for attempt after attempt to finish a run at all, becoming intimately familiar with every way that weight transfer can send you barrel-rolling through and over a corner like a Halo ragdoll.
Eventually, your hands catch up to your developing danger sense, and you feel yourself automatically feather the brakes as you pitch down or launch up, drifting sideways up ramps to minimize those gaps in tire-contact. Even then, the feeling of danger only dulls for a while; keep your chain through a long first lap, finally crush Liberty Island’s marathon deathmarch of reverse speed-checks and beveled edges, and your reward is a second lap at double the speed.
It makes me feel very mortal.
Every reset should be enraging, a parade of unpredictable pratfalls as you nudge the edge of the handling model and it immediately explodes. But you’re racing against ghosts of your leaderboard neighbors, real people whose bests are just barely beyond yours; you’re always surrounded by peers, sneaking peeks at each others' screens and listening to joyful cheeseball ska, trying to get better a little at a time.
Sure, you get to watch them fuck up and make asses of themselves, bathing in schadenfreude as someone with an anime Steam name nudges a corner and turns their vehicle into a paper plate. But if you’re struggling with a course, they’ll mark the safe lines, expose all the myriad ways you can gain time and keep control; if you’re dominating it, reaching the limits of what grip and speed and focus allow, they’ll show you how you can push yourself just a little further. The next improvement is always legible, always tantalizingly close; they did it, and so can you.
I feel like I’ve played a thousand flat-color low-poly Retreaux Inspired Arcade Racers—games born without fingerprints, drenched in reverb, holding boost meters and unlock systems and trees made of Blender cones in front of the hole where their handling models should be. Games that put a three-digit number on the speedometer, do all the VFX tricks and camera tuning to make me almost believe it, then slide my vehicle around massive, placid banked corners like it’s being dragged with a mouse. Games that are predictable, that are approachable, that treat frustration like a four-letter word.
I think we have enough of those. Give me something that makes my heart race and my teeth grind, that has me whooping and hollering over the simple act of surviving a turn at all. Give me high highs, low lows, and a system that’ll fight me every step of the way as I wrestle it into submission. Give me a game that feels like speed should feel, dancing with death every time I step on the gas.
Launch me off that goddamn ramp again.
“I’ll keep on going
until I crash into forever
and I’m standing high above the crowd”