As a former delivery guy, I have a fondness in my heart for videogame trucking. It lets me reclaim the simple satisfaction of moving things where they need to go without needing to endure all the things that make people glad they aren’t a delivery guy. There’s just one problem: Videogame truckin’ isn’t weird enough.
My six years of delivery work regularly involved surreal events, uncanny individuals, inexplicable decisions, and plenty of other inscrutable encounters. Videogame trucking, however, tends to be extremely scrutable—until this week, when developer Code Wakers launched an open playtest for Prospice: Anomalous Logistics, an upcoming driving and delivery sim that’s properly unfathomable.
In Prospice, you play as an employee of an organization that would be right at home alongside the SCP Foundation, the Federal Bureau of Control, and any number of groups poking around the Backrooms. Its mission is researching an island that is, in the Steam description’s words, “cursed by the corpses of ever rotting gods” and “a place where the world itself unravels.”
Unfortunately, the open wilderness isn’t the best environment for researching the remains of a massive, mouldering entity—which is where you come in. As a logistics driver, you’ll undertake delivery tasks to support and supply the expedition, all while managing fuel, navigating unpaved terrain, and ensuring whatever still-twitching godflesh might be weighing down your flatbed gets to its destination unspoiled. Ideally while surviving, which—in my experience—isn’t guaranteed.