Here’s an admission: I am 37 years old and have never learned to drive. I tried once, in the summer of 2021, and during my second lesson my instructor asked me if I played a lot of video games. When I answered yes, he said, “I thought so,” in a tone that was very clearly not complimentary. Regrettably, it turns out that hundreds of hours spent mercilessly beating my friends and family at Mario Kart and causing vehicular chaos in Grand Theft Auto do not translate instantly to real-life driving skills and judgment. I love racing games precisely because they are unrealistic.
Because I still don’t have my licence, I ride my bike everywhere. It’s a giant orange monster of a thing, big enough for my two children to ride on the back, and it looks ridiculous. It makes me look ridiculous, next to the Lycra-clad middle-aged men on their carbon-fibre frames who zoom past me on the regular. It’s not something I could ever take out into the countryside or down some mountain trail. For that, once again, I must turn to video games.
There are surprisingly few games about cycling, but rather like my abiding love for virtual golf, I have developed a longstanding mini obsession with them nonetheless. One of my all-time favourite games is Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a mountain-biking game that has you performing extremely precise adjustments to your trajectory down increasingly treacherous mountains, soundtracked by minimalist nature sounds and the sound of your rider smacking into boulders. Knights and Bikes is another lovable cycling-based adventure with the vibe of a 1980s summer holiday, starring a couple of kids exploring an island on two wheels.
Lately I’ve been playing Wheel World, from California developer Messhof (who also made the one-on-one fencing classic Nidhogg). You ride around a sizeable island on an easy-to-handle racing bike, keeping an eye out for hidden paths and ramps and bike parts and taking on local riders in races when you feel like it. It’s a low-octane, cartoon-coloured Forza Horizon on a bike; a game that captures both the freedom and peace of cycling. You don’t feel like you’re controlling a vehicle; you can’t control gravity and wind and the contours of the road. Instead, you just ride.
I’ve been recovering from an inconvenient, painful injury for most of this year (hence my periods of absence from the newsletter), so relatively undemanding, feelgood games are just what the doctor ordered. Wheel World is a racing game that calms the nervous system, a rare thing indeed. You are chosen at the start by an ancient bike spirit, and must challenge the island’s speediest champions to reclaim supernatural bike parts. Unlike in Lonely Mountains, none of this is particularly difficult – I was winning races effortlessly most of the time – but it feels really good to ride around, winding up hills and then freewheeling down towards the city at the centre of the island, heading out to the Provence-reminiscent farmland where you share the road with tractors. You don’t even have to worry too much about sticking to the tarmac.
I’ve played a few racing games that are structured like Wheel World, but none that feel like it. It made me feel entirely at ease. It’s a whole game-world constructed entirely around bike worship, with no complications and no distractions. Tooling your ride is half the fun, as every new part slightly changes how it feels to pedal around (and they come in fun colours). The soundtrack is exactly energetic enough during races and exactly absent enough when you’re riding around enjoying the vibe and looking for something to do. After five hours or so I was clearly overqualified to take on the final race, but I didn’t want it to end, so I spent another evening exploring everywhere I hadn’t been yet instead. Everywhere I went was explicitly designed for two-wheeled pleasure.
Sometimes in a period of physical or emotional recovery, you are in need of a huge game to get lost in; sometimes you just need something short and sweet with the power to lift your mood. Wheel World has helped me miss riding my real bike a little bit less.
What to play
Longtime readers will know that I have bounced off every Hideo Kojima game I’ve ever played, but our critic Tom Regan was delighted to return to Metal Gear Solid 3, which is being rereleased later this week as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. “Snake Eater is a leaner, meaner Metal Gear, a cold war caper owing just as much to James Bond as it does Apocalypse Now,” he writes. “Kojima makes no secret of his love of Hollywood, yet where his works often balloon into unwieldy epics, this game is still his most filmic achievement to date. It’s silly, self-contained and enjoyably campy, veering from the sublime to the ridiculous with admirable swagger. A seamless merging of cold war paranoia with anime-esque silliness.”
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox
Estimated playtime: About 20 hours
What to read
-
According to Bloomberg (£), the reason that the much-anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong has taken seven years to make is that its developers were simply having too much fun and didn’t want to stop. “It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going,” said Team Cherry’s William Pellen.
-
An incredible quote from Sony’s PlayStation boss, Hermen Hulst, from a Financial Times interview (£), after last year’s Concord fiasco: “I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”
-
Last week’s Gamescom convention in Germany broke attendance records, bringing 357,000 visitors to Cologne, according to organisers. Are in-person gaming events finally returning to a stable state after the pandemic years?
after newsletter promotion
What to click
Question Block
Reader Tom asks this week’s question:
“With all the remakes flying around, where is the Vagrant Story update that everyone (me) is crying out for?”
We’ve all got that one game, haven’t we? The one that we know would be positively transformed by modern tech if only someone would give it the green light? Vagrant Story isn’t completely pie-in-the-sky: Square Enix is a publisher that’s shown great respect to its back catalogue, and though a three-part mega-remake along the lines of Final Fantasy VII ain’t gonna happen, I give Vagrant Story a 50% chance of at least being rereleased, largely because Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida says it’s one of his favourite games. I’d expect it as a fan-pleasing surprise reveal in one of the big yearly showcases.
We’ve revisited the question of most-wanted remakes a few times over the years, so why not ask again: what games from the annals are you still waiting for someone to dust off and revive? And if you’ve got another question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on [email protected].
