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If you play games on a PC and like cars or racing, you may already be familiar with My Summer Car, a legendary indie title from 2016 (how the time’s flown) about building a project car from nothing in Finland and trying not to die in the process. A sequel’s long been in development, and I’m pleased to report that the day of its early access release has finally arrived. Get ready for My Winter Car.
These games are really life simulators, but the life you’re trying to live isn’t a full or remotely pleasant one. “This is not a fun game,” the official trailer for My Summer Car warns right out of the gate. I embedded a gameplay video for the original game below, recorded by its developer, to give newcomers a sense of what they’re in for.
“As you might guess, building this car from scratch is taking a huge amount of time,” he says, surveying a cherry red coupe, moments after his in-game avatar sips a beer. “For me, who knows how this car has to be built, who knows every bolt size, the correct order, and simply all of this shit, it takes at least two hours to get this car finished.”
(11) My Summer Car: What is it all about!
That’s the kind of challenge you’re up against here. I think it really says something that My Winter Car’s Steam page advertises “first-person survival game with Permanent Death feature” before anything about building cars. We also have “full car and engine assembly with 200 unique parts” to look forward to, as well as “player body temperature simulation” and “realistic law enforcement that gets after you if you do stupid things.”
What more could you ask for? How about crippling depression in a country that sees, at most, six hours of sunlight this time of the year? “Even with all the fun and interesting things, there is still terrible coldness and darkness of Finnish winter that makes the life dangerous, depressing and tiring,” the description continues. “It is hard to keep a track even of the time of the day. World around seems to go forward, but player is spiraling even deeper in the pit he was establishing already in the original game.”
Look, My Summer Car was a game that was once updated with a patch note that read “added TV to jail.” When—not if—your character died, you’d be presented with a newspaper report about what happened. It’d be front-page news, because nothing else of significance ever happens in that neck of the woods. I mean, just check out the sequel’s adrenaline-fueled “cinematic trailer” below:
MY WINTER CAR – Cinematic Trailer
Amistech Games recommends you try My Winter Car only if you’ve already played the first, because this one’s apparently even harder. That makes sense; I imagine doing anything in Finland is harder in the winter than in the summer, except freezing to death. You can try not to while also building a car for the low price of $14.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
