I’m a fan of bike games, especially these days when I'm woefully short on time to ride. I’m not a fan of doing bike maintenance tasks, which is one of the prices you pay for liking to ride bikes. Upcoming game Wheel World not only makes bike tinkering easier, and more fun, than it is in real life, but scratches the riding itch my hectic schedule and a flat tire have kept me from.
Wheel World (nee Ghost Bike) has a demo out now as part of Steam Next Fest. It’s a brief slice of the game, in which you wake up on a mysterious island and have to help a skull spirit recreate the connection between worlds. You do this by activating shrines charmingly shaped like bike bells, collecting bike parts, and levelling up your character through bike races or taking simple jumps.
Some of the game’s slangy dialogue is a bit cringe, the way extreme sports games can sometimes be, but the game itself does away with the flash and tryhard of those games in favor of focusing more on just riding your bike around. The world is stylized and colorful, with wide open roads that let you play with exploration and momentum rather than technical tricks. Your bike makes wonderful mechanical sounds as you roam around, reminding me of the sound design of games like Lonely Mountains: Downhill or Season. To activate the first bell shrine, you have to bike up a hill (booo), where you encounter a bike gang blocking the way and have to challenge them to a race. Racing in the demo felt pleasantly simple, with the biggest challenge being drafting--following along in another rider's wake--to earn speed boosts. In real life, the one bike race I competed in was a terrifying blur of shouting and crashes that encouraged me to stay as far away from other cyclists as possible, so it was fun to experiment with the opposite here.
Winning races or completing their optional side challenges levels you up in the form of reputation points, and can earn you bike parts, which you can also find scattered around the world. The new wheels, saddles, drivetrains, and frames you find can boost your bike’s speed, handling, and other attributes, and they also change the look of your bike. In the game’s trailer, this can lead to an unholy mashup of a bike, and I think it will be a lot of fun to balance functionality with creating the monster bike of my dreams in the full game.
In real life, I’ve got a flat on my daily bike right now, which I got literally just as I arrived at Nathan’s book launch party a few weekends ago. While bike shops make fixing flats look easy, I am abysmal at this most basic of tasks. (I’m especially bad at it on my bikepacking bike, which has tubeless-ready tires that are impossible to get off.) To encourage myself to do this little chore, I’ve positioned my bike so that it blocks the doorway to my bedroom, thinking it would force me to pull out my levers and pump. Instead, I just think “I really should fix that” and squeeze by every time I need to change my socks or go to bed.
But playing the Wheel World demo has reminded me of how lovely it is to just bike around, following where roads go and enjoying meandering rather than thinking about speed or challenging terrain. While I wish fixing my flat in real life were as simple as selecting a wheel from Wheel World’s menu, it’s also not nearly as hard as I think if I have a little patience and confidence. By the time you read this, hopefully I’ll be back out on the road (maybe this time with an actual patch kit in my bag), which should tide me over until Wheel World comes out this summer.
