What the Car?

Most car games are about going fast. What the Car? is about what happens when a car stops acting like one. It comes from Triband, the Danish studio that made What the Golf?, a game that took apart golf by making nearly every hole a joke about the rules. The same approach works here, and Triband is sharper at it now.

The player controls a small red car, and it stops being a normal car almost right away. Within minutes it grows legs and starts running. Soon it’s flying with jetpacks, climbing skyscrapers, going fishing, sneezing its way forward, and appearing in parodies of other game genres. A loose story ties several odd worlds together, with strange characters and a quest to finish. The plot is mostly there so the jokes have somewhere to happen.

The format matters more than any single joke. The game is built from hundreds of short levels, and most introduce a new mechanic, a new rule or a new visual gag. It doesn’t build skill in the usual way. It asks, again and again, what it wants from the player right now. That makes it hard to compare with other games. It isn’t a racer, a platformer or a puzzle game, though it borrows from all three.

The release history explains who has played it so far. What the Car? launched on Apple Arcade in 2023 on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, so for its first year it required a subscription. It came to Windows on Steam in September 2024, with 35 achievements and support for 18 languages. The Steam reception has been very positive, and critics were warmer still. GodIsAGeek rated it highly, and TopGear called it “a brazenly irreverent take on cars.” That’s a fair compliment from a magazine that treats cars with near-religious seriousness.

• Rules that change every level: Each stage changes the controls, the physics or the genre. The main task is figuring out how the new level works, not mastering one set of controls.
• Hundreds of short levels: Most stages take less than a minute. That suits quick sessions and keeps a weak level from wasting much time.
• Genre parodies: Many sections imitate other kinds of games. It’s funnier if you know the genre being mocked, but it still works if you don’t.
• Built-in level editor: Players can build their own ridiculous courses and share them, which gives the game a life after the main story.
• Simple controls and no violence: There’s little to learn up front and nothing unsuitable for kids, so it works as a family game without feeling watered down.
• Platform reach: It’s on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV through Apple Arcade, and on Windows through Steam, with 35 achievements and 18 languages.

The Core Loop: Figuring Out the Level

Most games teach one set of rules and then test them harder and harder. What the Car? keeps throwing its rules away. Each level poses the same unspoken question: what is this stage actually asking for? The intended rhythm is drop in, try something, laugh at the result, work out the trick, move on. Then the next level makes that trick useless.

This works because Triband tunes the discovery carefully. The levels are hard to figure out, not hard to execute. Failure rarely comes from slightly off timing. Being stuck means not yet understanding the idea, and once it clicks, clearing the level usually takes a few seconds. So the payoff is the realization, not the execution, and the design delivers that moment very often.

The downside is replay value. A joke already heard isn’t as funny the second time, and a puzzle already solved has no surprise left. What the Car? doesn’t try to hide this. It moves quickly because it knows each idea only works once.

Pacing and the Snackable Structure

Short levels are the game’s biggest structural strength. A level that doesn’t work, and there are some, is over in thirty seconds. In a normal game, a bad level can ruin an evening. Here it barely registers before the next one starts.

That makes it well suited to short bursts. A five-minute stretch on a phone covers a handful of complete jokes, each with a setup and punchline. In longer stretches, the change of worlds and the light story provide a sense of progress. There’s enough structure to keep things moving without needing to follow a plot.

Some levels are much more memorable than others, and that’s a fair criticism of the format. When a studio releases hundreds of ideas, they won’t all be good. Some levels are brilliant. Some just use an idea, get a small smile, and end. The average quality is high, but it isn’t consistent, and a few favorites will stick while much of the rest fades.

Comedy as Game Design

Triband is unusually good at making the controls themselves funny. The jokes here aren’t in the dialogue. They’re in how the car moves once it has legs, what a sneeze does to momentum, and how silly a sedan looks climbing a building. The humor isn’t watched; it’s caused by pressing buttons.

This is hard to do. Most “funny” games put jokes in cutscenes and keep the actual play ordinary. What the Car? makes the play itself the joke, so the laugh and the action happen at the same moment. That’s why it feels closer to physical comedy than to written comedy, and why it works across ages and languages.

The genre parodies work the same way. When the game imitates another genre, it doesn’t just copy how it looks. It exaggerates that genre’s familiar habits until they’re ridiculous. Players who know those genres will get more of the jokes. Players who don’t will still find the car’s behavior funny.

The Level Editor

The level editor is the main answer to the replay problem. Once the story’s surprises are used up, other players’ levels become the new source of them. How long that lasts depends on how active the community is, and community content is rarely consistent. Still, it’s the right addition for a game built around surprise, and it makes a short game last longer.

Where It Falls Short

It’s short. That’s the complaint finishing players raise most often, and it’s fair. The quality is high, but there isn’t a lot of it, and once the surprises are gone there’s little reason to replay the main game. The uneven levels come from the same design choice that makes the game work, but some stretches still feel like they’re filling space until the next great idea.

The art style is clean, bright and readable, and that’s a practical choice as much as a look. When the rules change every thirty seconds, each new scene has to be understood immediately. Triband uses simple shapes, a small set of strong colors and clear outlines so the visuals never get in the way of the level. The red car stands out in every scene.

The animation carries a lot of the comedy. The legs, the jetpacks and the way the car wobbles when it moves oddly are timed like jokes, and that’s where much of the charm comes from. Menus stay out of the way, which is the right call when the levels themselves are the draw.

Performance should be a non-issue by design. A stylized 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the levels are small. The one technical demand this kind of game makes is fast loading, because slow loads between very short levels would ruin the pacing, and the structure is clearly built around that requirement.

iOS (iPhone and iPad): This is where the game started, and it shows. The short levels suit a phone, and the simple controls suit touch. Touch controls aren’t precise, but the game rarely needs precision, since its challenges are about understanding the level, not timing. The iPad’s larger screen helps with the busier scenes. The drawback is access: on Apple devices the game is part of an Apple Arcade subscription. That’s a good deal if you already subscribe and an obstacle if you don’t.

Steam (Windows): The PC version arrived in September 2024 as a one-time purchase, and many players will prefer that to a subscription. Physical controls feel more deliberate than touch, and the handful of levels that do need some precision benefit from it. The larger screen also helps the animation jokes land. Steam adds 35 achievements for completionists, and it’s the most natural platform for the level editor and sharing courses. The very positive Steam reception suggests the port came through intact.

On both platforms, 18 languages and very little text make it easy to play wherever you are.

What the Car? is a game about being surprised, and it keeps that up for almost its whole length. Triband took the idea behind What the Golf? and made it more polished, more varied and more confident. The car grows legs, flies, climbs, fishes and sneezes, and it’s genuinely funny because the player is the one causing it.

It isn’t flawless. The game is short, some levels are much weaker than others, and it can’t be as surprising a second time. But it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It packs more ideas into a few hours than many 40-hour games manage, then hands over an editor to keep going. We recommend it to players who want constant surprise without a big time commitment — and to them, it’s a solid pick.