Upon launching, it immediately throws you in the career mode without letting you configure anything first. Pressing Esc, Backspace, Tab or any other conceivable "menu button" didn't yield anything. I spent 15 minutes playing the game before I was able to quit to menu. Only much later I realized that that the menu button is H for whatever insane reason.

So you have a choice of several insane-looking characters, but in the story mode it's like "select a character" and there's only guy there, lol.

The story mode is by far the most entertaining mode here. I mean, first of all, the style of this game is incredible. I'm sure it's probably influenced by some specific racing anime, but the only frame of reference for me is the Running Man short in the Neo Tokyo anthology. Though my memories of it are very vague, so I might be way off. Only direct reference I caught was that every time you cross the finish line, your car does that Akira slide. But the game crafts this really atmospheric and cozy escapist world with immaculate aesthetics and perfect soundtrack, which comes to shine in the story mode, as there are tidbits of vivid lore before every race that spark your imagination and context provided about the somewhat abstract locations you race on. The premise is that you're racing against AI opponents, each of which is a colorful character with their own quirks, and there are seemingly some cool plot twists. The writing here is hilarious and unhinged, which is great in my book. The way the characters talk to each other has that chaotic randomness of Daniil Kharms.

However, I got to chapter 5 out of 12 and got stuck. There are several difficulty levels, and they generally function exactly how you'd expect them, but here on chapter 5 the game suddenly became insanely difficult. The track is a super tiny circle, so it's an almost constant drift. There are boost panels and slowdown panels on the track, so you have to really mind where you're driving, and it becomes this balancing act because it's hard not to hit the walls when you speed up mid-turn. I played the track several times and could not score higher than the 3rd place. It's simply impossible even you drive near-perfectly. Like you can literally never hit the walls and hit every boost panel, and the entire time you're seeing your opponent right in front of you, almost like a mirror.

But you can't always be perfect. As that famous line from the Wire: "See, the thing is, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once. And how you ain't gonna never be slow? Never be late? You can't plan through no shit like this, man. It's life." Sometimes it's your fault, but other times just the randomness of AI and the subpar collision physics. I don't understand how they work. When you crash into another car, it's always a gable as to who gets derailed. This game got me really missing Black Box's Need for Speed games.

I've tried the other modes too. There's a career mode and a championship mode, both of which made me wonder why they're separate from the story mode. Like, you could have a championship that's a career with a story... but whatever. The career mode lets you buy and upgrade cars, and championship is just championship... just compete for points or something? Then there's arcade mode, which works like Outrun, with checkpoints that reset your timer. And finally there's Time Attack, which I haven't tried.

Honestly, just replaying that one chapter in the story several times got me all burnt out. But I do want to come back to this game later. Hopefully, by the time I do, they will have rolled out some patches.