Roundabout

My first few minutes with Roundabout felt like someone handed me a joystick and told me the controls were fine, actually, and then laughed. You cannot steer the limousine in any conventional sense, because the limousine never stops rotating. What sounds like a novelty prank turns out, after some patient adjustment, to be a genuine puzzle mechanic rooted in timing and spatial reasoning. The rotation is constant, and your only tools are acceleration, braking, and eventually a jump ability unlocked roughly a third of the way through. Learning to curve around trees, oncoming traffic, and buildings by syncing your movement to the spin is the kind of skill that clicks quietly, and then you feel weirdly proud of yourself for figuring it out. The game is set in 1977 and commits completely to its B-movie bit. Every mission opens with a full-motion video cutscene of a passenger climbing into the limo and delivering their bizarre objective, played by real actors in deliberately cheap costumes with deliberately wooden line delivery. The passengers include a Swedish-Canadian tourist, a talking skeleton named Jeffrey, and a police squad called Ge-Op hunting Georgio across the city. Georgio herself, played deadpan by Kate Welch, never utters a word, communicating entirely through glances that somehow land funnier than the surrounding dialogue. The story, about fame, a romantic subplot with a character named Elizabeth, and a feud born from a car accident, is genuinely endearing underneath all the absurdism. No Goblin's background in AAA comedy titles shows in how precisely they calibrate the joke-to-sincerity ratio. The open world starts in the suburbs, where the roads are forgiving, and gradually opens into a denser city grid where explosions become frequent company. The limo has a five-hit health limit, and a checkpoint system keeps frustration manageable during the main story. For completionists, each mission has secondary objectives: finish without damage, beat a time limit, avoid the direction-shifting tire stacks scattered around the map. Side challenges branch off the main loop and include competitive leaderboard modes for things like keeping a ball balanced on the limo roof or maximizing pedestrian casualties at a beach. None of the challenges are as satisfying as the core routing puzzles, but they add texture to a world that would otherwise feel thin. Upgrades, including slow motion, jumping onto buildings, and driving on water, arrive through story progression, and the pacing of their introduction is handled well. The honest critique is brevity. The main story runs three to four hours, and while collectibles and score-chasing can extend that, the mission variety starts to feel like a loop before the credits. Critics split roughly along the lines of those who surrendered to the silliness and those who wanted more mechanical depth for their time. Both positions are fair. Roundabout is not trying to be a long game, and it knows when its premise has been fully explored, which is a kind of artistic discipline that deserves some credit. It was also a two-person debut project, and the craft and consistency across its short runtime is quietly remarkable. If you have three evenings, an appetite for grindhouse humor, and enough patience to let an unusual control scheme teach itself to your thumbs, this one rewards the trust.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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