Get In The Car, Loser! Is an amazing lesbian road adventure RPG with great characters, music, story, lore and mechanics that I blazed through and enjoyed thoroughly, both with the story that made me want to know what was going to happen next and the battle mechanics that made every encounter interesting and satisfying to play. It’s free (with paid DLC that I immediately bought to support the game’s creator) so I recommend it without reservation.
After a small introduction to the cast of characters, you are thrown into the main loop immediately; mainly having your characters talk to each other while you are on the road and letting you change lanes from three choices. While dialogue progresses, you get closer to the next encounter, whether it’s an enemy, a resting area, a quest fight, or a boss. The rest areas sometimes have quest hubs, a shop where you can buy gas and items, and a free healing spot. The shopping system is interesting because you get random items from a specific “Tier” and you need to equip everybody with gear of a certain tier or higher before the next one is available.
Items can be consumables or pieces of equipment that you slot to one of your three “actions” you have per character, and during battle you can progress from one action set to the next, then perform a big attack before resetting to the first one. Equipment has specific effects depending on the character that uses them, so you might have healing when equipped on Sam or attacks when equipped on other characters. The tier of the items you are wearing influences the offensive and defensive strength of your character, so it’s important to seek new items when you can. Each item can be upgraded once by sacrificing other items (or stickers that you can get later on) and they also have “stories” that unlock as you use the item in battle or upgrade them. The stories are flavor text about the world and are really cool.
The battle system itself is really good, you press buttons assigned to each character and they’ll do the attack in your current action set, then get put on a cooldown. Enemies have a stagger meter that gets filled as you do different attacks, and when it gets to a certain point they are staggered and take increased damage. When you get to the last action set the move to go back to the first one heals your whole party and increases stagger by a whole lot, so that’s fun to bust out. There is a lot of complexity in the battle system - I kinda wish that elemental affinities had been better explained because even at the end there were times when I wasn’t sure if element X healed element Y or dealt half damage or what not - because there are a bunch of abilities you’ll get from equipment and enemies have their own tricks up their sleeves, but it never got old. The only weird thing I’ve found is that when you decide to target your own party (via healing or buffs), it’s by using the directional arrows instead of using the same buttons you were used to.
The game was never too difficult; Sometimes I got knocked out, but the penalty is almost nothing. Other times I just had to tweak my party and figuring out which items I needed to solve some of the more difficult or puzzling quest encounters. You also have to manage a fuel gauge that goes down as you go (and the consequences of having no more fuel seemed dire, even if you get a way to replenish it on the road) but that never was much of an issue for me. Some fights did take a lot of time, but that’s because I purposefully made them more difficult using a system called “The Devil’s Clock” that you can turn on and off to have fights get extra special rules but give bonus rewards. I really enjoyed having that system and played most of the game with it enabled.
Story-wise, I connected with much of what was going on, many elements of the game being approachable as events in our real world and real struggles people can have in the face of an oppressive society filled with shitty people and their terrible opinions. A whole chapter is dedicated to Sam’s inner turmoils as the rest of the party kinda fades away and this part haunted me for a while. I really enjoyed the characters and their interactions and the whole thing kinda left me wanting to get in the car, loser! You really should try this game, it’s thoroughly good!
I tried starting the DLC after beating the game, but I couldn’t get far into it; You get a ton of items with completely unique abilities all at the same time, and that was too much for me to process, I kinda wish they would’ve been given across the DLC instead of all at once, but I might go back to it at some point!
