Get in the Car, Loser! Is the Queer RPG You've Always Wanted
The angels are angry. The divine sword has been stolen by a couple of young thieves. The machine god's slumber nears its end. Somehow, in the middle of all of it, you've been pulled into a pink car and embarked on the road trip of a lifetime with a handful of unlikely companions. This is Get in the Car, Loser! the new RPG from Love Conquers All Games. Their previous work includes Ladykiller in a Bind and Hate Plus.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Get in the Car, Loser! to see what it's all about. The aesthetic immediately sets it apart. Vivid, soft colors make the pixel art designs pop in a way I've never seen before in a game. Brilliant pinks are complimented by a splashes of turquoise, white, and the occasional dab of black. It held my attention, communicating its deliberate emphasis on queerness through visual dedication to a palette designed to fly in the face of traditionally acceptable color schemes.
This commitment carries over into the character designs themselves. Get in the Car, Loser! features women in its main cast who are beautiful while intentionally side-stepping conventional notions of what beauty. Sam and Grace are elegant despite possessing very different aesthetic priorities in their fashion choices. On top of that, the third member of the party who fought along side the two women was a striking non-binary character named Valentin. Easily my favorite of the three, they were able to dish out damage in a fight, rock a killer nose ring, and give some breezy, devil-may-care responses that I appreciated.
The UI in Get in the Car, Loser! builds upon all of this. While I found it a bit tricky to navigate at times, it presents a visually pleasing collection of menus and sub-menus. It reflects the color palette and presents up-close icons of the major characters. With a few snazzy UI design choices, the unique implementation and presentation of the battle system turns into a breeze to navigate and understand.
Those battle mechanics at play are really entrancing, too. Get in the Car, Loser!’s battles take place in real-time, so the faster you can input commands and make plans, the better your party will fare. Essentially, there are three different configurations of abilities and each configuration assigns a party member to a button on the controller. As the player inputs commands, each character will do their move, whether it is an attack or a heal or something else. This puts each character into a cooldown – that can be skipped by moving ahead into the next configuration of abilities. Attacking charges a meter that enables the player to use the powerful Sword of Fate. The sword does a good amount of damage, and it also fills a meter that stuns the affected enemy when full. This attack also resets cooldowns, starting the party back at the first configuration of abilities.
This means that there’s always something to be doing, as fast as you are able to do it. Once I got into the groove of combat, it began feeling more like a rhythm game than anything else. It felt good to play in the satisfying way certain JRPGs can hit that unique sweet spot with timed attacks, like in Super Mario RPG.
I got so into the battle system that when I came up against a boss intended to teach the player how to run away, I opted to try fighting it instead. I managed to get down a series of moves to chain the boss down in stuns as much as possible, hit a couple heals on the party, and then stun it again. I battled the creature until it lay inert at my feet. The developers were actually so impressed with that feat they drew me a sketch of Valentin.
I would be remiss not to talk a bit about the inventory management system. That’s right, you didn’t read that wrong; the inventory management in Get in the Car, Loser! is actually worth talking about. In order to counter-act that strange tendency JRPG players have to hoard resources, Get in the Car, Loser! actually comes up with a use for extraneous items. Players can sacrifice redundant items in order to boost the powers of useful items. This unlocks additional information about each item to teach players about the game world while also making abilities in the different battle configurations more potent. It’s great and I wish every RPG did something similar to this.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed my time with Get in the Car, Loser! I’m definitely going to be picking it up when it releases sometime next year. It’s so boldly different than anything else in the space right now. I need to see where this road trip goes.
Feature originally appeared on www.extra-life.org 09/08/19