With each passing year, Strange Scaffold has cemented its place as a must-watch (or play, in this case) developer because it makes what I’d like to call video game-ass video games. After all, they’re the same indie publisher/studio that gave us the Max Payne-esque El Paso, Elsewhere, the Hardcore Henry-like first-person shooter I Am Your Beast, and the austere hotel-chair horror oddity that is Clickolding. That is to say, their creative engine is made of the same stuff that gave rise to bacon-flavored ice cream. Its upcoming title sets anime fans behind the steering wheel of a kei truck, isekai-ing bystanders to another world.
During Steam Next Fest (which, to unversed gamers, is basically Valve’s seasonal demo disc event), Strange Scaffold gave players a taste of Truck-kun Is Supporting Me From Another World?! As if I needed any more paranoia about whether the developer has my house bugged, the fast-paced 3D platformer-racing game fuses Katamari Damacy, Crazy Taxi, and Denshattack!—my favorite silly video games—with anime mayhem serving as the fuel that makes it run.
While I was trepidatious that the fuel powering the appropriately sentence-long-named video game was the unled version of isekai, my least favorite genre taking over anime, against all odds, it’s managed to charm me for how it takes the piss out of the category and, in turn, allowed me to blow off steam from my frustration with isekai’s oversaturation by letting me be the perpetual inciting incident behind its madcap adventures.
To those unburdened with the knowledge of isekai anime, allow me to explain. Isekai anime are shows where a regular shmuck from our world is teleported into another world. Think Re: Zero − Starting Life in Another World, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Overlord, etc. Typically, it’s a high-fantasy world where they have a broken-ass RPG stat that makes them overpowered, and an ensemble of allies at their side to defeat a big bad. As someone whose job was to write up seasonal anime guides at Kotaku, trust me when I tell you there are as many iterations of isekai as there are grains of sand on a beach.
Usually, every isekai starts with said character dying. It just so happens that the most common way for protagonists to get spirited away is by getting run over by truck-kun, aka the noble kei truck. Tangentially, the trope has become so widespread and memed to death that truck manufacturers were sweating over it being bad PR for their working-man vehicles, according to Automaton Media. It’s here where I can only imagine the devs at Strange Scaffold whistled and snapped at their computer screens like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and said, “Let’s make a game that’s just that,” and I thank them for following through on that instinct.
As far as stories go, Truck-kun Is Supporting Me from Another World?! does what it says on the tin. You play a truck driver who, after hitting an overworked salarywoman otaku named Carissa and sending her into another world, is guilt-tripped into helping her harness the untapped magical power of hit-and-runs. Everything you wrap around the hood of your car is sent into Carissa’s world so she can farm XP and level up, which you can see in neat pixel art on the lower third of your screen. Thus, you’re tasked with running over people, drifting up parking garages, crashing through billboards, and sideswiping police cars to build up enough power to help Carissa defeat a myriad of foes and collect stars to help her get back to our world, all while making deliveries to keep your business running. But mostly, Truck-kun is a game that doesn’t want you to fret over the niggling details of multiplied wrongs making a right, and it’s an utter delight.
In the countless afternoons I’ve spent playing Truck-kun on my Steam Deck, I’ve obsessed with strategizing the optimal ways of hitting the maximum amount of pedestrians with my aerodynamic truck. In some cases, beachfronts make for a fine feasting ground to feed unsuspecting cityfolk to my hungry hungry lorry.
Other times, it’s the city plaza where folks are resting on benches, soaking in the sun on a hot summer’s day, that serves as the prime target-rich environment for my Initial D drifts to ragdoll fools. All the while, my gamer third eye expanded by multitasking vehicular manslaughter and 10-second-or-less deliveries with building enough meter to power my buff isekai elf girl so she can deliver devastating blows to slime monsters, dragons, and skeletons. What’s more, Carissa not running me like the King of All Cosmos does with his failson whenever I didn’t manage to check off matter-of-fact objectives like “Hit 10 Beach Chairs,” “Honk 30 Times,” and “Drive Through the Man” gave me ample motivation to spin the block and play for a couple more rounds.
If any of the above piqued your interest, you can look forward to playing Truck-kun Is Supporting Me From Another World?! when it releases on July 29th on Steam and Xbox Series X/S.
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