Full Steam Ahead #3 | Get In The Car, Loser!

Over the past decade and a few, I somehow accumulated a long list of games in my Steam library. Some were gifts, some were review codes, and some I really don’t recall how I got them. The one thing many have in common is that I have never been able to play them. Often, this was due to my laptop not having the power to run them, and other times, it was because my cheap third-party controller wasn’t recognized by the program. Sometimes, things just never worked out.

But all things are different now, for I have a Steam Deck and a will to delve into my backlog to see what I’ve been missing. Some of it may even be good; much will not. Thus continues our new limited edition segment: Full Steam Ahead. As an addendum for Pride Month, we’re looking at Get In The Car, Loser!, a road-trip adventure RPG where the only thing definitively straight is the highway.

Get In The Car, Loser!

I picked this game up on Steam not long after it first released. I wasn’t the only one to do so on the RPGamer staff, and you can read Sam Wachter’s review here, but I didn’t get too far into it at the time. The game ran on my old laptop, but there was some lagginess, and the musical backdrop suffered. With a heavy heart, I decided I just couldn’t enjoy it properly in that state, so I set it aside for another time.

Thankfully, it runs much better on the Steam Deck, so that time is now. I also have the benefit of playing it after half a decade of fixes and tweaks, so the combat isn’t quite as frustrating as when Sam battled through. Still, there must be some out there who appreciate the game’s Story-Only Mode. The base combat system somewhat resembles Valkyrie Profile, with a party of three (later four) characters mapped to four control buttons. The Steam Deck again proved a better interface for this than my old laptop, and I had little trouble directing the flow of things as I juggled attacks and occasionally foes. The right-shoulder button makes the party cycle through three sets of attack load-outs, the better to continue attack combos, while the party’s designated Heroine for the Age lets loose with the Sword of Fate every third cycle. Equipment management is key, both for having a good balance of skills available for each cycle stage, but also because character levels, Roman numerals I through X, are determined by the aggregate of their equipped trinkets. The biggest hurdle to success is getting the gas money from battles to both keep the tank filled and to purchase new trinkets to boost or equip.

Just your standard road trip fare, smacking robots and taking names

So comes the other benefit of playing this game years after release: the DLC scenarios. These come free with any version of GitCL, regardless of when gotten, with one available to play as soon as quests become available in the second act, and the other unlockable only after the conclusion of the main story in the fourth act. The first DLC scenario, “Battle on the Big Boardwalk”, sees the heroes take a side trip to the beach, and as welcome as the change to beach attire might be, the opportunity to grind for gas money and purchase trinkets without needing to worry about life on the road is actually a big help.

As for the story, it’s an appropriately silly affair. To whit, a dimension-hopping wayfarer—for all intents and purposes a furry lesbian expy of Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy V—crashes through with her semi-feral girlfriend in search of new and interesting weapons. Magnanimous as she is, she trades the heroes her Zantetsuken for their Sword of Fate, and is much put out when they say no to the awesome deal she’s forcing them into. By the end, once all the wayfarer’s ad hoc questing trials are complete and she finally returns the Sword of Fate, the heroes will be quite a bit more flush with cash, likely a full trinket level higher, and as a plus, they get to keep the Zantetsuken, which will straight-up delete one enemy or boss phase per battle. All of this goes a long way towards making the main game less painful to survive, later on. As a bonus upon the bonus, gas stations from thereon out will also offer trinkets from other worlds, items with unique abilities that match to a character’s own level, and thus maintain their utility through to the end.

No, no it is not.

This is good because the final boss is still a major hassle—though anecdotally it seems that the early phases of the battle are less spongy on the hit points. However, on two occasions I had the final phase edging the very end of its health bar for ten minutes or more without it dying, while on the fourth attempt the thing died in under two minutes. Either there are unmarked action flags, possibly tied to using the Sword of Fate as often as possible, or a remaining bug in the works. Either way, persistence paid off, and I could continue to the next new item of note.

The second DLC, “The Fate of Another World”, comes after the main plot, and so does not contribute to the player’s success there, but it provides a logical continuation for the plot while dragging the heroes into alternate-universe shenanigans with some major debates over the social value of action, the various forms which that action can take, whether it’s even worth it to be a hero, and a university Intro to Philosophy level discussion of teleology. There are definite implications, both political and cosmic, for the way the DLC plot ends, and it paves the way for more road trips to come.

Fate calls, but heroes come knocking

All things considered, I am glad that I left Get in the Car, Loser! for later. I enjoyed it on many levels, but I can also see how it would have been less enjoyable on older hardware and with fewer fixes and additions. But for anyone else who’s held off on getting this game, I can recommend it highly. The writing is tight, the characterizations are solid, the music is forever on point, and the villainous rants from the Machine Devil Cult membership have only gotten more topical as their real-world counterparts become less hinged. Finishing this game is a source of pride to me, and a perfect way to have spent some free time during Pride.