I grew up exactly in a place like this, except with a flatter landscape. But I'm suspicious of anything that makes me nostalgic for a place I hated. As the sun descends, all the bad memories resurface... Ugh.

My brother always loved simulators, including truck-driving ones, so I was exposed to that a lot as a kid and played quite a few myself. I think the feeling this game is trying to evoke - that of a relaxing drive through sparsely-populated environments - is something all truck driving simulators evoked. I remember one evening coming home and seeing my brother play Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of Steel on the newly-installed Windows 98, and it was this dark interior of a truck with the only light coming from the speedometer and a dark road ahead only lit by the headlights, and it's just this hum of the truck in the background. The room was dark too. I still remember that experience, and I think throughout the decades I've come to re-evaluate it many times. What seemed boring as a child seems almost peaceful as an adult. This is what I'm really nostalgic about. Not the environment I lived in as a kid, but the environments that video games transported me to.

There's been a lot of these lo-fi nostalgic games lately, and I feel like this is gen-z aching for an era that they didn't get to truly experience. Social media has changed everything. I'm old enough to have lived in both eras, but for them it was just a glimpse, probably experienced more through media than directly. But see, for me, all of this lo-fi shit is not doing much. Because I can go fire-up 18 Wheels of Steel right now and get the experience that this game is referencing, and get it pure in all its beautiful complexity. These meta games have to simplify the gameplay so it becomes a kind of symbolic representation because that's the only way to convey the point. If they just made a proper truck-driving simulator, nobody would get it. It has to resemble a truck-driving simulator while actually being a minimalist portrait of a place and time. And personally to me it just seems pretentious. It almost feels like the game is trying to tell me what it was like.

Furthermore, being so overtly self-aware, it almost robs me of the immersion. You can say a lot about old video games, call them corny or cheesy or some other edible product, but they were sincere. Yes, 18 Wheels of Steel did not actively try to elicit an atmosphere of loneliness or calm, but it allowed you to experience those emotions anyway. At the end of the day, the games were what you interpreted them to be. They gave you all the elements for these feelings to naturally arise after you spend some time with the game and bring whatever is in your head into it, and engage with it in full sincerity. They didn't have to make a point, they were pure in a way. Though I'm philosophically opposed to cinema verite, I think its main principle kinda applies to the video game medium more than anything. The Daoist concept of Ziran ("just-so-ness" or "as-it-is-ness") comes to mind.

Yeah, but so, like the actual gameplay here kinda sucks. Like, if we look at it as a truck-driving simulator.

Obviously I know that that's not what it really is. So yeah I'm not even gonna go there.