For someone who really likes driving, I don’t get along that well with many of today’s driving games. Too many of them are about the apex of the pursuit: driving the very fastest cars on the most challenging tracks, in cut-throat races or mad dashes against a clock. This is fine and fun enough, but it’s also not really the same kind of driving so many of us enjoy so regularly, is it?
You don’t have to be good at something to like it
AftermathRiley MacLeod
My favourite kind of driving is a gently winding country road, with green hills or beaches or mountains (or all three) whizzing by, and no timer or chasing pack or obnoxious in-game radio DJ to bother me. So I’ve been having a great time this week with Slow Roads,which you may remember as a browser game from a few years back, but which is now available (and upgraded) on Steam.
Described as “a casual driving game designed for long, cathartic journeys on endless scenic roads”, Slow Roads’ solo dev, Anslo,says its cruisey pace “recreates the journey I would take to school, an hour’s coach drive there and back through the hills of the Peak District”, which was “always my favourite part of the day”.
The game puts you behind the wheel of a type of car of your choosing, in a location of your choosing (which generates randomly and infinitely as you go), then sets you free to just…drive. You don’t hit checkpoints, you don’t race other cars and you definitely don’t accrue points or end up on a leaderboard. This isn’t a game about racing, it’s a game about the simple, hypnotic pleasures of driving.
The first 4-5 times I started a session in Slow Roads I flew straight off the road or smashed into a guardrail, because my reflexes were demanding that I drive this car fast, until I remembered I didn’t have to do that here. The handling model and course design isn’t meant to test your reflexes, nor is it intended to have you slamming on the brakes and holding a racing line.
It just wants you to drive somewhere around the speed limit (if only to keep the car on the road), get into a kind of zen-like state, maybe put some music on (the game includes a handful of radio playlists but also lets you just point to a folder of tracks on your hard drive) and weave along a meandering country road. Once I got a handle on this–it took me a while; my racing muscle memory is strong!–I had a lovely time cruising around, especially on the Peak District map with its undulating hills.
The cars aren’t exactly set at an Assetto Corsa level of realism by default, but they handle as well as a game like this needs them to handle, nice and floaty so you can just lean into every corner. If you want to mess around with things, there’s a surprisingly detailed set of car setting sliders where you can adjust the ride, stiffness, etc.
There’s very little else to say here because there’s little else to Slow Roads other than the driving. Which is why I’ve enjoyed it so much: just like when I’m behind the wheel of my actual car, the best drives are the ones where there’s nothing else to focus on other than you, the car, the road and some nice scenery.
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