My Winter Car is out now – a frosty early access sequel to the hateful motoring sim that has you "spiraling even deeper"

Last January, our reviewer Brendan “Shitty Shitty Wham Bam” Caldwell called My Summer Car “a sordid sim of piss and pistons that won’t hold your disgusting little hand”, proceeding to warn that it “will either scare you off with its complexity or induce Stockholm syndrome with its mesmerisingly neglectful approach”. Out now in early access, My Winter Car is all of that plus the “terrible coldness and darkness of Finnish winter”, in the words of developers Amistech Games.

The devs add that “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.” Awesome! In context, the presence of a generative AI disclosure on the Steam page feels entirely appropriate, like luxuriously urinating all over a deep-frozen turd sandwich.

The premise seemingly remains that you are trying to fix up a horrible car without dying of immolation, dehydration, lightning strike, and falling off your moped, amongst other foul ends. Now, you also have to worry about pervasive ice and snow. The “cinematic” teaser video below is insultingly opaque, showing only a man in a bobble hat having a smoke next to a covered trailer, in vague echo of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata contemplating a banana, except that My Winter Car is unlikely to be rich in either potassium or wholesome, Nintendo-ish fun. Regarding the developer’s comment about losing track of time above, it’s worth noting that there are parts of Finland in winter where the sun doesn’t rise for months.

There was a pinch of genAI stuff in the original My Summer Car, too. It appears to be more prevalent this time. “Some base textures have been AI generated during the development,” the devs note in their disclosure. “Some of the imagery and speech audio in the in-game TV programs are AI generated. Some in-game radio music is AI generated.”

Honestly, the use of AI generation for a game like My Winter Car is a frightfully unreadable escalation of the debate around generative AI. Much as I despise the bigger mass market implementations of the tech for their corrosive and reductive effect on art and culture, that very infamy makes genAI a good fit for a game that, as Brendy wrote, appears borne of putrid misanthropy and “snickering schadenfreude”. I have a terrible feeling that a My Generated Car game would do well, however unlikely to appear on any NVIDIA showcases.