Idle Thoughts

Paving the long and winding road (★★★☆☆)

I had to hire a contractor to repair some pavement once. That’s how I came face to face with the asphalt paving machine. It truly was a vision of hell: dirty, searing hot, spewing noxious diesel fumes and vomiting gooey molten rock. It had a smell that carried through the walls. Seriously, being close to such a thing cannot be good for your long-time health. There’s also a pavement machine in Roadcraft, but with all that nasty stuff abstracted away; now it merely stands for Industry. I witnessed all the basic steps of building a road that day. Those are present in Roadcraft: spread a foundation, flatten it, pour asphalt, then roll it flat. The game doesn’t make this process easy, oh no, but it certainly simplifies the reality of it quite a bit. That’s what a good simulation game does, or any video game for that matter: distill an activity into a pleasant simulacrum of it, without the diesel fumes. All of the industry, none of the dust.

All this to say that I thought I had accumulated enough dad energy for a real dad game. I found Spintires to be a bore, aimless tedium with no real goal or context. I showed Spintires to a friend and he shrugged and said, “Why?”. That’s the kind of stuff that forces you to question your hobbies.

But maybe things have changed. I’ve changed, maybe the series has too. I considered trying Snowrunner, but it asked me if I wanted the five-year plan. Jesus, I’m not doing central planning here, I just want a game. Roadcraft it is then, maybe I’ll have more fun if I start from the ground up, before the tsunami of nickel-and-dime DLC hits.

So do I like Roadcraft? Yes and no.

There’s definitely more of a sense of purpose now. You’re from a disaster relief company, so you fix an area after a natural disaster. The tasks are somewhat varied and sensible: laying electric cables, fixing pipelines, clearing rubble and, of course, making roads. You get a single .gif of a snarky redhead to give you your list of quests and subquests. You know the drill. It’s a lot like playing an open-world game, but instead of being “open”, the world is uncompromisingly hard to navigate. Maps have no real link between each other, but at least your vehicles and funds carry from one map to another.

It still sounds like one big recipe for tedium, and it is, but it’s not without its charms. There’s a satisfaction in gaining inch by inch over squelching mud to finally deliver the crucial piece of cargo that will reactivate a facility. It certainly feels like playing a serious game. No violence, no silly story, just getting stuff where it needs to be. You’re getting things done. Look Ma, I’m a productive member of society! The maps don’t change as much as I’d have hoped, though. You’re not magically fixing entire villages. Every map starts as a dump and each of them ends as a dump with slightly more passable roads.

Most of the game is holding the gas pedal and watching your truck inch forward. For a game about navigating rough terrain, that part isn’t really hard at all. I suppose you could call Roadcraft a podcast game, if it wasn’t for the fact that a moment of inattention can lead to catastrophe. The only activity that requires actual skill is operating the crane. Adjusting rope length, crane height and length and moving the camera almost requires three hands to do correctly.

Also, for a game about building roads, it sure is excruciatingly hard to do outside of specific quests. You need to get a whopping five vehicles to a location, which is more work than it sounds. It’s even worse if you’re not in range of a sand quarry and have to go to and fro with your dump truck. It’s usually more convenient to just forget about it and tough it out by only using vehicles with better off-road capabilities. At least building a sand road is more manageable and requires only two vehicles. Creating makeshift roads by filling holes with sand is surprisingly satisfying. Oddly enough, though, your magic sand is the only part of the scenery you can modify permanently.

The physics are… weird. Even the dirtiest Soviet tractor has the nervous handling of a European supercar. Vehicles somehow get bouncier as they get heavier. Glancing a wall at medium speed doesn’t just make you stop abruptly, it sometimes sends you flying backwards into the air. I’ve never seen a dump truck do that, but perhaps I’m not a real redneck.

The real joy, and the real point of the game, is of course playing with toy trucks, albeit in a slightly grown-up version. It’s all about owning ’em, adding them to the collection. Instead of racing cars, you collect dirty soviet trucks. Perhaps this is less exciting at first glance, but every truck has its niche, a special role it’s meant to play. Sports cars have only one function, and that is to alleviate someone’s midlife crisis. Roadcraft gave me a newfound appreciation for work vehicles. I now look at work sites with a new curiosity. It’s like being let in the hidden world of trucks. Some of them are like strange insects, shaped by necessity. It’s like overturning a big rock and finding beetles with unusual appendages they’ve had to grow to meet some unseen evolutionary demand. These trucks exist to perform a specific job and nothing else. Why is there a circular steel brush at the end of that excavator? Look, this one has a special fork for planting trees!

That being said, 50% of my time so far was spent in that one small cargo truck that has both an in-built crane and decent off-road capabilities. As I said, the game is excruciatingly slow, so not having to bring multiple vehicles to a site is a godsend. Heck, the most fun I’ve had with the game was while cutting corners and using vehicles not intended for the job. Use a tow truck to carry steel pipes. Ram an AI vehicle back into dry land with your dump truck. Good times.

There’s something almost comedic about Roadcraft. You overload your truck to save time, so it tips over during a tight corner. You then send a crane to assist it, but it becomes bogged down in the mud. So you send another vehicle to help both. Etc. Etc. It’s better to laugh than to cry, I suppose. Besides, any vehicle can be teleported back to the garage. In that sense, the stakes are never very high. I hear the older games had fuel and no way to teleport stuck vehicles back to the garage. I suppose the added risk can encourage better driving and give the game extra weight. I’m just not quite sure the driving is satisfying enough that the extra pain would be tolerable.

When it comes to video games, I have the heart of a completionist and the patience of a saint. Therein lies the problem. Roadcraft is not really a bad game, but it is ferociously dull. Sure, maybe there’s a market for that. It’s a “dad” game, a podcast game. That being said, I can’t help but think there’s something unconscionable, deep down, about Roadcraft. I’m not just talking about the fact that Roadcraft is clearly a “platform” for future DLC and patches that add in basic functionality, or that some in-game doodads are linked to creating an account with some poorly defined “service”. It’s also that the game offers slow, repetitive tasks to the very people most likely to lap up that stuff. It’s like bringing the fat kid to an all you can eat buffet. Or the special kid to the train yard. I suppose I question the very premise of a podcast game. What’s the point of playing a game so dull that you need to listen to a podcast while playing it?

Maybe my dad energy is just lacking.