Distance

I came to Distance expecting a competitive racer I could run lobbies in. What I got instead was closer to a rhythm game at 200mph, and I mean that as a compliment. The campaign is short - maybe 90 minutes on your first run - and it is not really about racing other cars at all. You are alone in a neon-collapsing city, trying to reach the end of each track before saw blades, lasers, and disappearing road sections destroy your vehicle. The tone is closer to cyber-horror than Gran Turismo, and it works surprisingly well. The movement kit is where Distance earns its reputation. Your car can jump, barrel-roll, boost, and deploy wing-door thrusters to go fully airborne. That sounds simple, but the skill ceiling on chaining those inputs cleanly is real. On more complex tracks you end up flipping the car 90 degrees mid-air to land on a wall, kicking the thrusters to grip it, then timing a jump to the next ramp in one fluid motion. There is also an engine temperature meter tied to your boost usage - overheat and your car explodes unless you ease off or hit a checkpoint. It adds a layer of resource management that sits somewhere between comfortable and punishing depending on the track design. The controls are tight and responsive, which matters at the speeds this game operates at. Arcade mode is where things get competitive. You race ghost replays on leaderboards across Sprint, Challenge, and Stunt variants, earning medals to unlock more tracks. The speedrunning angle is real - the flying mechanics open up off-track shortcuts that the community has been exploiting and mapping for years. Multiplayer supports up to 12 players online and 4-player split-screen locally, with modes including Reverse Tag and Stunt alongside standard Sprint. Honest note: the online player pool is small. Peak concurrent numbers at launch sat well under 1,000, and that has not dramatically changed. If you are buying this for competitive online play right now, manage expectations. Ghost leaderboards scratch a similar itch solo, but live lobbies require some effort to find. The level editor and Steam Workshop are the real longevity play here. The community has built an enormous library of tracks over years, many of which push the engine far beyond anything in the base game visually and mechanically. Trackmogrify adds procedurally generated random tracks on top of that, so if you run out of Workshop content you essentially never will. The campaign's narrative is deliberately abstract - the story involves a mysterious countdown, looming mechanical entities, and a general sense of dread - and it will either resonate atmospherically or feel too oblique to land. Do not go in expecting clear answers. The IGF gave the game an Excellence in Audio honorable mention, and the soundtrack justifies that; it is the kind of synth-horror score that makes every restart feel intentional rather than punishing. Carry-over gripes: vehicle customization is mostly cosmetic, restricted to car skin colors. Obstacle visual consistency in early levels can be confusing until you memorize the language of the track design. And the multiplayer experience is only as good as the active player count on any given evening. None of these are dealbreakers for the right player, but they are the real friction points people run into. For anyone who has ever chased leaderboard ghosts in a racing game, enjoys the muscle-memory satisfaction of obstacle courses, or wants something that feels nothing like a conventional racer, Distance is a strong call.

Fred · Scout Team

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