My Summer Car Veers Into Early Access Next Week

My Summer Car [official site], the drunk cousin of Jalopy, is coming to Steam Early Access next week. It's a driving game and life simulator about building, fixing, and driving your own car, while also larking about and trying not to die in Finnish countryside of 1995. So sure, you can take your car apart and fine-tune it to win races, and you can also find a job to pay for beer then get smashed and die drunk in a ditch. That's the full spectrum of '90s Finnish rural life as I understand it.

So! My Summer Car is a life simulator focused around cars. You get hungry and thirsty and need to waz and all that, staying alive so you can dick about with cars. The simulated cars and the maintenance thereof are quite serious, down to needing to pick the right-sized spanner for different nuts. You can tune, fix, and upgrade your car, obviously. You can enter races. You can drive boats. You can pootle around the countryside as you please. You can get jobs to pay for all of this. You can rile up the police. Go to saunas. Siphon fuel. And you can get hammered and die terribly - naturally, it has permadeath.

I've had an eye on My Summer Car for ages, fascinated by the eclectic bits of both cars and life that it chooses to simulator. It's a joke game in that it's meant to be funny but it looks quite earnest - not another kooky game endlessly entertained by wacky physics. Also, I really dig the dev videos:

That's from April 2015, mind. This is more like how it looks now:

Amistech Games are bringing My Summer Car to early access on October 24th. They expect it should launch properly within a year, during which they'll polish it and bosh in a story. Given that it's a dicking about simulator, playing it unfinished doesn't sound like too much of a problem.