Well well well, look who’s come to say goodbye. No use, buster. You won’t have ol’ Josh Wolens to kick around anymore. I’m off. Gone. Scarpered. My future is a long stretch of road near Białystok and all who ride upon it. I’m a car mechanic now. Also, a drunk. Somehow these things compliment each other.
I’ve been playing some Cheap Car Repair, is what I’m saying, and I’ve scraped off just enough rust to realise that this business is my true calling. Set in an anonymous Polish village in the mid-to-late ’90s, it’s a game of cutting corners, pocketing air filters, blasting Slavic pop and consuming vodka by the litre. I believe it may be a documentary.
It’s a comedic game—your whole gig is doing car repair on the cheap, as sloppily as you can without driving your customers to actual violence—but it’s also meditative in that Powerwash Simulator kind of way. Repairing cars is, well, zen. It’s calming to methodically strip a car of rust before reapplying the paint, or to remove and repair a tyre. It almost feels a shame that the game is so keen on you doing a bad job—some part of me wants to remove every millimetre of rust rather than just painting over it.
But I will admit it is kind of funny when you get one over on your schmuck clients. The game’s tutorial centres around a local street thug who wants you to scrape the rust off his clanker and repaint it. Well, fine, except I got a little enthusiastic in the removal process—the car was all bare metal by the time I was done.
Which would have been fine, but I only had the one can of green paint. The car was only halfway dressed by the time that spray can hissed dry, and while Cheap Car encourages sloppiness, you can’t quite get away with returning a half-painted car to someone.
What you can get away with is: patriotism for the proud nation of Brazil. I had no more green paint, but I did have yellow, and so I decked out the car in the colours of the Brazilian flag. Brazil is a lot like Poland. They’re twinned. Don’t look that up.
My punter was pleased with his paintjob and the game complimented me on a job well done as I sipped one of the 52,000 bottles of beer and vodka that litter Cheap Car Repair’s garage. It was, genuinely, quite amusing to get the message that my client didn’t suspect a thing.
My only issue with the game, from what I’ve played, is that it sometimes leans a little too wacky. The central conceit of the whole thing is enough of a laugh without also making some pretty hackneyed blonde jokes or giving me a burp/fart button. But that’s a minor quibble, and it couldn’t have been further from my mind as I sent my friend off in the Ordem e Progresso-mobile.
Cheap Car Repair hit Steam last week. It’s got a demo you can check out now.
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