Distance

Most racing games are about other cars. Distance is about the road itself — and the road is trying to kill you.

Developed by Refract, a small team formed out of the DigiPen student project Nitronic Rush, Distance spent years in Early Access before its full PC launch on September 18, 2018. That long gestation shows: this is a game with almost no fat on it, built around one idea and committed to it completely.

The pitch is simple on the surface. You pilot a rocket-powered car through a neon-drenched, vaguely sinister city where the infrastructure has turned hostile — saw blades bisect the highway, lasers sweep the tunnels, entire road sections collapse under you. Your car answers with abilities no sane vehicle should have: it jumps, it rotates freely in mid-air, it deploys wings and flies, and it boosts hard enough to set itself on fire. Refract calls it survival racing. A better description might be parkour with a chassis.

Market positioning is where Distance gets interesting. It doesn’t compete with Forza or even Trackmania on volume; it competes on identity. Critics landed at a reserved Metacritic 74, while the Steam audience has been warmer. That gap is telling. Reviewers docked it for a short campaign; the design argues that the campaign is only a fraction of what the game offers — and that argument mostly holds.

• Survival-racing hybrid driving: Jump, mid-air rotation, deployable wings, and boost turn a racer into a full movement system. Tracks are obstacle courses first, race circuits second.
• A genuine breadth of modes: A story-driven Adventure campaign, Arcade time trials with global leaderboards across dozens of tracks, plus Stunt, Challenge, Reverse Tag, and Trackmogrify, which procedurally scrambles track pieces into new runs.
• The developers’ own level editor: The full in-game toolset Refract used to build the campaign, wired into Steam Workshop and its large library of community tracks.
• Multiplayer that remembers couches exist: Online play plus local split-screen — a feature the AAA racing genre has quietly abandoned.
• A reactive synth soundtrack that shifts with the action.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is the old Trials-style compulsion — crash, restart, shave a second — but Distance layers a second skill ceiling on top of the first. Learning a track means learning its choreography: which wall becomes the floor, when to cut the boost so your engine doesn’t overheat, where the road ends and a two-second flight sequence begins. Instant restarts keep the failure cost near zero, which matters, because failure is constant and mostly earned.

What makes the handling work is that every ability trades against another. Boost builds heat; heat eventually detonates the car; jumping and flying bleed speed. The best runs are heat-management problems disguised as driving. That’s the difference between a gimmick and a mechanic — the wings aren’t a set piece, they’re a resource decision you make forty times per track.

Adventure Mode: Short, and Smarter Than It Looks

The critics’ consensus complaint is real: the Adventure campaign is brief — a single sitting for a competent player. But dismissing it on length misses what it’s doing. The story is told entirely through the environment and the road itself: no cutscenes, no codex entries, just a city that grows more wrong the deeper you drive into it. Text flickers on walls. The architecture starts behaving like an organism. It’s a racing game with an actual sense of dread, and it ends before the trick wears thin. Wanting more of it is a criticism of quantity, not quality.

Where the Real Game Lives

Adventure is the tutorial. Arcade mode is the game. Dozens of official tracks, medal thresholds that escalate from fair to sadistic, and global leaderboards that turn every track into a knife fight over hundredths of a second. The late-game difficulty spikes are genuine by design — a handful of tracks demand near-frame-perfect flight sections, and the game does a mediocre job of ramping toward them. Expect a wall around the back third of the official track list.

Then there’s the editor, which is the real long-tail story here. Refract shipped the same tool they built the campaign with, not a simplified consumer version, and the Workshop’s track library ranges from faithful campaign-alikes to deranged endurance gauntlets to outright puzzle levels. Years post-launch, new tracks still appear regularly. For a niche indie racer, that’s not community support; that’s a self-sustaining ecosystem.

The honest caveats: Trackmogrify is a curiosity, not a mode — randomized track assembly produces runs that are playable but rarely composed, and composition is exactly what makes the hand-built tracks sing. And the online multiplayer population is thin outside scheduled community sessions. Treat multiplayer as a bonus for organized groups, not a matchmaking experience. Reverse Tag with friends, though — one player holds the tag, everyone hunts them through a death course — is legitimately great split-screen chaos.

The aesthetic is Tron by way of a haunted house: black voids, electric magentas and cyans, roads that glow like circuit traces. It’s a look that was already familiar in 2018 and Distance still makes it feel owned rather than borrowed, mostly through lighting discipline — the game knows when to go dark, and the horror-tinged sequences land because the neon disappears when the design needs it to.

Technically, it’s a modest Unity title, which cuts both ways. A 2D-styled game of this scope is light on hardware, and the instant-restart design depends on quick loading — the kind of loop this engine suits. The flip side: menus and UI are functional but plain, and up close some surfaces betray their indie budget. The reactive soundtrack covers a multitude of sins; the synth score swelling as you hit a flight section is the game’s single best sensory trick.

On Steam, Distance is at its fullest, for one reason: Workshop integration. The community tracks are the difference between a 10-hour game and a 200-hour one, and browsing, subscribing, and loading them is one click each. Play with a controller — analog triggers matter for boost feathering, and mid-air rotation on a stick is far more precise than keyboard taps. Keyboard is playable for time trials but you’re leaving tenths on the table. Steam is also where the leaderboard scene is most active.

Distance is what happens when a small team spends years polishing one idea instead of shipping five mediocre ones. The campaign’s brevity is a real flaw, and the difficulty curve has teeth it doesn’t warn you about. Neither sinks the whole: a driving model with genuine depth, an art direction with conviction, and a creation ecosystem that has kept the game alive long past launch. We recommend it to the right audience — time-trial players and track builders will get the most out of it — while everyone else should temper expectations about the campaign.