For the last week I've been very ill. Possible Influenza-A due to an outbreak at work. And for whatever reason I suddenly desired to play Jalopy. A little unsure at first, I watched a few LP samples on youtube.

I was fascinated.

I'm not sure what it was. Maybe the muted oppressive colour pallet combined with illness. But the next thing you know I went over to GOG and picked it up from the daily deal and prepared to drive around eastern Europe.

I've driven utter shitboxes of a car. My dad once had a total piece of tetanus shots that would break down if it went above 30km/h. Or if you stopped. The seats missing parts of fabric. A seatbelt that didn't work. And part of the floor was missing, allowing you to see the road under your socks and sandals. And that thing still felt more stable than this Laika 601 Deluxe.

But hey. At least it had all the doors.

And that is part of your first mission. Uncle Lutfi wakes you up and says he has something to show you. Who is Uncle Lutfi ? Is he your actual Uncle? Why are you sleeping in his garage? Who Knows!

He then shows you a broken down shell of a car and one of the first jobs is to salvage a door for one side. All you need to do is to walk up a pile of scrap and grab one. It auto joins to the car when you click back on the vehicle while in your possession.

And this is where the deception of this game starts. This was a simple task but had me wanting to salvage more as the game progressed. Alas, in my ~5 hours of playing I found one broken down wreck and it had nothing of use for me.

I wanted to salvage. I wanted to hunt in scrap. I wanted to find components to make this piece of crap run a little better. Sure, I could buy parts, but I never found enough to trade to be able to do so bar one time I needed a new battery.

After finding a door and the components needed to run an engine, you select a route and drive off in the shitbox. The game does not drive like a normal driving game, hence putting it into 'walking sim' territory.

You interact my clicking and use WASD for basic controls. You see that handbreak? click on it to use it.

Can't find your keys? Pull down the sun visor and find them there.

That radio? Yeah, click on it to play some groovy tunes. That volume knob? Yeah! Let's make some noise! Oh! OH! Sorry Uncle, yeah. That was a bit loud. I'll turn it down again.

This. Is. ... Honestly, rather cool.

It extends to the bonnet and boot of the car too. Or, Hood and Trunk if you prefer. The bonnet needs to be released with a leaver inside the car. The boot has limited space and you need to organise how items are set inside (though, mostly automated).

It's surprisingly fun to have a breakdown. Stop the car, put on the hazards, start hunting around for what you need to do a makeshift repair.

Except... The Laika shitbox fails far too often. Fuel is consumed like mad. There's never quite enough cash to get you to the next town's hotel.

An early experience had me travelling on foot hunting for roadside sausage (not joking) that I could collect and trade at service station. And when I got there... I had forgotten my wallet. Apparently pockets don't exist and they could not give me the cash into my bare palms.

Several journeys back'n'forth hunting for sausage, forgetting my wallet AGAIN, then forgetting a jerry-can I needed to carry fuel back to the Laika slowly became less fun and more an exercise in frustration. But after some 30 minutes of futzing around, I was able to make my way forward.

The game has a lot of promise to it, and could of been so much more.

My final thoughts on it is that it is one of the rare few titles I find much more fun to watch someone else playing than it was to actually play through myself.

Which is a shame. When the game is working and allows you to have enough goods to survive, it's a wonderful experience. When it has a run of no roadside boxes (for sausage and other items), when there's no broken wrecks, when it simply crashes or the dialogue breaks. It becomes something of an annoying frustration, and the reason for Lutfi's journey is forgotten.

Hence watching people with more entertainment value than I getting anxious in their chair as they approach a border crossing knowing that all that fabric in the back of their Laika may be getting them fined.

Game Acquisition: GOG (Daily Deal)
Platform Used: GOG
Tweet Threads: 1 2 - 14-15 April 2018
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64bit)
Processor: Intel Core i3 2GHz or equivalent
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Dedicated graphics card with 1GB memory
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 2 GB available space