My Summer Car review: A sordid sim of piss and pistons that won’t hold your disgusting little hand

I can’t get out. I’m trapped in a tractor full of beer and spare tires. I haven’t taken a shower in days and a fly has gotten into the cab, buzzing around my ears, anticipating the feast that will come from my sweaty summer death. I just spent nearly an hour driving this tractor to the shop, buying car parts, and rumbling back in the dark. I took my eyes off the road for two seconds to turn on the headlights. It was a mistake. The road curved sharply and I went off a steep bank, tipping my tractor on its side. The door is stuck, the tractor’s wheels spin helplessly. There is no recovering from this. I restart the game for the third or fourth time, not knowing whether to laugh or sob.

My Summer Car is as hardcore as they come. It does not simply throw you in at the deep end. It ties you up in a cloth sack with 50 kg of lug nuts and dumps you in the Baltic sea. “Sink or swim!” yells this game at you, but in Finnish, so even that you cannot understand. To a certain kind of person, this is an act of love.

Even before you wake up in your rural house, you will sense the tone of the game. Upon startup, you choose from a variety of graphics settings, including “shitty”, “better”, “good” and “Golden Eye”. The main menu plays looping music that belongs on a Geocities website in 2003. You can click on a smiley face to turn this music off, and the smiley face will become a sad face. My Summer Car is not interested in being a “good” game. It wants to answer a profound question: how many gags can a car mechanic sim squeeze in before it even begins? How many people can I alienate before they even give me a chance?

Once you’re in, you encounter a recognisable life sim. You play a young man who wakes up in his bedroom in rural Suomi, Finland in 1995. Your parents have gone on holiday, leaving you only one instruction: fix the busted car in the driveway. Get this vehicle in good working order and it may even pass an inspection by local authorities. A wholesome summer project.

In any other game, this might manifest as a Stardew Valley style marathon of cosy odd jobs, with plenty of bright and breezy characters to meet. But here, you are offered an instructionless hardcore survival game in which you must juggle meters such as “stress”, “fatigue”, “hunger”, and “urine”, all while trying (often failing) to get to the local store before it closes for the day. The countryside is vast and often featureless. The people who populate it are full of contempt.

But to explore that countryside you need wheels. You find your uncle’s tractor hiding in a shed, and there’s a moped leaning against the wall of the house too. Learning to drive these is itself a challenge. Like the rest of the game there’s no tutorial. You are at the mercy of a cluttered controls screen and may gamely try to intuit which lever to pull and how to turn on the ignition. But operating the game’s many switches, buttons, and knobs, is a finicky lesson in pure patience. This is what happened when I first tried to drive the tractor without help.

Left click operates some buttons and levers, while right click will pull them back. Sometimes you need to use the scroll wheel to rotate a knob. You will often have to lean to either side just to reach the parking brake. The throttle is operated by clicking on the lever, but gears are changed with hotkeys. If racing games simplify driving to create speed and fun, My Summer Car recomplicates the act out of snickering schadenfreude. Throw all your intuition into a bin when you arrive in Finland, my friend. You must learn to video game all over again.

You must also learn the entire inner workings of a passenger car. The broken vehicle in your driveway is the rusty chassis of a car called the “Satsuma”. Almost all the parts you need are arranged in shelves and scattered on the floor of your garage. A fully disassembled combustion engine lies in bits and must be painfully reconstructed. The steering column needs to be put back in. The suspension, brakes, gearbox, wheels – everything, every little bolt – has to be accounted for.

Some of these parts you’ll need to order via mail. In another game this might simply be a menu. You’d click the part and – bloop – it would show up on your shelf. Here, ordering, say, a fuel mixture gauge means using a magazine in the garage to make an envelope appear, driving 20 minutes to the store, putting the envelope in the post box, driving back home, waiting two in-game days, getting a phone call from the store owner who says your package has arrived, driving back to the store to pick it up, then coming home again. It is comically laborious.

Even when you have all the parts, you will not necessarily know what to do with them. I have spent almost as much time watching YouTube tutorials for My Summer Car as I have actually playing it. If you’re anything like me, you will hunt down a guide to drive the tractor. You will seek out a proper map of the local area. And you may or may not enjoy making sense of this diagram explaining how to build the car’s engine. For a man who only got his driving license in his mid-thirties, just reading the names of these components brings to mind the piping jargon scene of Patriot. I relied heavily on the thorough guidance of the game’s wiki. And I still came away from my time in Finland an abject, grinning failure.

For many, there’s something admirable about games that care this little about you. The reason such games persist is that their “figure it out” attitude is atomically bonded with the act of discovery and the sense of reward that this brings. In Rain World, you struggle through endless deaths to discover strange and wonderful creatures. In Pathologic 2, you fight an interminable hunger to discover haunting children by railway tracks. In My Summer Car you will discover that pissing straight up into the sky lets you drink your own urine. It lowers your thirst bar.

This is part of its stubbornly juvenile schtick. There is a swearing button, a button to flip people the bird, a button to light and smoke a cigarette (it lowers your stress). The sauna, where you can also lower your stress meter, has a gauge with a little naked man on it, and the temperature needle stands in for his steadily rising boner. Meanwhile, the people you meet are heinous, demanding, and sweary. Many are almost as hostile to your existence as the game is itself. One drunk man will call you in the middle of the night to demand a ride, like you are a taxi. A large number of characters in the game, from old ladies to policemen, have the same haunting and hideous face.

It would be easy for an impatient player to write the game off as childish jank. But the immaturity is just an accent to the strength and variety of its simulation. Every sim is defined by what mundane actions it considers important enough to simulate. In this, there is a frightening array of possibilities. If you leave the sauna on for too long unsupervised, you will burn down your entire house. If you answer the telephone while a thunderstorm is happening, you may get electrocuted to death. But you can also ignore that drunk caller and get a good night’s sleep by unplugging the phone before going to bed.

You will get blinded by a bee in the eye if you drive the moped without your helmet. You can use the TV to summon teletext. You can cool down your car’s overheating radiator by peeing on it instead of using coolant. But pee on electrical items like the TV or fusebox and you will again be electrified to death. Forget to put on your seatbelt and you will probably die in your next crash.

All this is ignoring the sheer weight of the car simulation too. That every piece must be screwed in place is ambitious enough. But the engine parts must also be tuned in perfect order, with bolts and nuts at a perfect level of tightness. Any part not sufficiently screwed in may pop out of your car like a cat leaping away from a cucumber. The tires will pop, the clutch will wear down over time, the exhaust fumes will come out an unhealthy black. Even if you get so far as completing the car, you will need to diagnose the damn thing before driving it.

This is admirable and intimidating in equal measure. If you’re anything like me, you’ll install a hefty set of mods that allow you to keep track of bolt sizes, or carry more than one item at a time, or even (oh my god) see the house’s light switches in the dark to avoid stumbling around for 5 minutes absolutely lost in your own bedroom. After that tractor-tipping crash left me inconsolable with self-pity, I went so far as to install a cheat console to spawn in all the items I’d lost. I could not face another hour of tractor driving while under review pressure. You will likely not have a Damoclean deadline. So you can, if you really want, opt for the glorious nightmare of permadeath mode – the Finnish vehicular equivalent of a no-hits onebro run.

In my case, I lacked the wherewithal to see the game through. I got halfway through building the Satsuma and gave up in favour of touring the game’s other destinations. Luckily, you can borrow a speedy looking car from Fleetari, the local mechanic, to see how it feels to be in a vehicle that can travel over 30 miles per hour. I rammed it full speed into a bus and caused a serious highway accident. The bus driver got out and simply started walking away in disgust or shock, I couldn’t tell which. When I looked inside, there was a single passenger: an old lady whose neck was bent at a hellish and unnatural angle.

I left the rental car upside down and abandoned on the roadside, and cheatwarped my way home to try and continue work on the engine – one last go at seeing it to completion. Two or three days later, Fleetari would call my house phone to threaten me for not returning his ride. I hung up before he finished swearing.

I don’t have the strength of spirit (or time) to finish the Satsuma, or to indulge the many other activities I’ve read about. You can enter rally races, for example. You can chop firewood and deliver it to a “nearby” farmer. You can go to an island in the middle of the lake in a motorboat and catch a fish for your grandma. But all of this really needs a car, and looking up the next steps of that process I see that it involves finishing the engine, installing all the internal fixtures like seats, screwing on the doors, wiring every single component in the dash and under the hood, then finally filling up tanks with respective fluids and oils. If I get the car started, I’ll still need to troubleshoot any problems, like wacky alternator belts or wobbly distributors. I am in awe of this goofy, unforgiving game. I also do not want to play it anymore.

I hang up on grandma one last time while shaking with a hangover from drinking an entire bottle of vodka, as an invisible hornet flies around my head. My Summer Car is as merciless as it is crammed with simulatory detail. It does not like you as a person, and it likes you even less as a player. If you’re looking for your next masochistic gaming challenge, look not to the Soulslikes of the world, but to this Finnish life sim – a car mechanic’s hell/paradise that will drink hours of your life and piss it back out, stinking and pointless onto the carpet, tracing the yellow outline of an obnoxious smiley face.