The spirit of OutRun is invoked in today's randomly selected title from my 561 game backlog. I'm playing one for every day that the UK is in lockdown...
OutRun is one of the most iconic, and for me one of the very best, video games of all time. As such, it’s imitators are legion, and have been arriving regularly ever since its original release back in 1986.
I’ll save you a long monologue on Yu Suzuki’s masterpiece now, as I’ve already written about it at length before, and, as I said the last time this came up, the fact I titled it ‘A Love Letter to OutRun’ should give you a clue as to my feelings.
Slipstream is one of the more recent games to pay homage to the old master, with the whole OutRun series serving as inspiration, and a dollop of ‘Initial D’ added for good measure. It began life on Kickstarter in 2016 and finally gained release exclusively to PC (including Linux and Mac) in 2018.
I saw it originally on Rock, Paper, Shotgun in mid 2015, when the developer released an initial demo onto their itch.io page. I saved it to my Google Keep and promptly forgot about it. A digital tidy up brought it back to my attention three and half years later, and this time I immediately took myself to itch to buy it… and then forgot about it for another six months.
Which brings us to today.
The Synthwave/Vaporwave aesthetic (I’ll stick to the broader ‘synthwave’ descriptor from here on) has seen a huge rise in popularity since the game’s conception.
Hotline Miami really got the ball rolling, and eventually the style was popular enough to hit the mainstream with ‘Far Cry Blood Dragon’ and Call of Duty’s ‘Zombies in Spaceland’ map.
The success, or otherwise, of this style will often come down to how much the creator genuinely embraces it, as with 'Hotline Miami', and how much of it is graphical lip-service, looking at you: Call of Duty.
Thankfully, 'Slipstream' is one of the most genuinely synthwave games I’ve played, not only in its overall style, colour palette, and soundtrack, but in the feeling of driving which, when everything clicks just right, is borderline transcendental.
That may sound hyperbolic, but the combination of pure speed, vivid colours, and having my eyes pinned to the vanishing point in anticipation of the next corner gave me a feeling that I usually only get from my regular replays of ‘Rez’; that of being ‘in’ the experience, while my mind and hands seem to work independently.
Triggering this reaction would be enough for me to recommend the game on it’s own, but ‘Slipstream’ is more than a trancy ‘OutRun’ clone.
The main ‘Grand Tour’ gameplay mode follows the classic branching structure but adds a rival to each of the individual stages. Beating them becomes the main focus as ‘Slipstream’ is a game that wants you to see every one of it’s 20 beautiful stages, and hear every tune on the extensive soundtrack, so the difficulty is balanced to allow you to do just that.
To this end, reaching the end of the tour will doubtless prove any obstacle, but the addition of the rivals is also the addition of challenge, and this means that, unlike 'OutRun', reaching the end is not winning the game.
'Grand Tour' is just one of five single player modes.
There’s also ‘Cannonball’; a mode where you race all 20 levels end-to-end, ‘Battle Royale’; which is similar but with the focus on rival racers, there’s the standard and self explanatory Time Trial, and the package is rounded out with ‘Grand Prix’; wherein a selection of 3 courses are (impossibly) presented as lappable tracks - there’s even the ability to upgrade your car between races with your winnings, improving your chances in each of the three series’.
‘Slipstream’ offers the opportunity to tweak it’s look with options in the menu and, while it may be a bit obvious, the CRT effect is one of the best I’ve seen.
However, the game looks it’s best in its pure form and when played in full screen where the crisp pixels and glorious proprietary 3D effect really shine.
As much as the game looks amazing, the soundtrack is phenomenal too, offering a huge variety of proper synthwave tracks, rather than the kind of self conscious sci-fi facsimile that too many other games have opted for.
With this depth of content the game is ensured of never being just a pretty face - a persistent problem with modern 'OutRun' wannabes.
‘80’s Overdrive’, for example, recently made the jump from 3DS to Switch and is a great example of how to get this kind of game, and this style, completely wrong; It does look decent, but the gameplay is dull and the soundtrack limp.
But it’s in the playing that everything comes together and pushes you into that ethereal headspace where you can just enjoy the experience as a whole.
Slipstream is the purest joy to play, and this is achieved with the kind of dedication to linking the audio visual elements to those of the gameplay that you usually only find in the very best rhythm-action games.
Slipstream - Escapes the shadow of it’s inspiration with pure synthwave joy and phenomenal, flat out, arcade driving.
If any of this has inspired you to play ‘Slipstream’ then please buy it from the developers itch.io page: https://ansdor.itch.io/slipstream (no affiliation). They will be far better rewarded for this sublime game via this platform than they would through that of Steam or any other.
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