Was more conflicted about this when it came out, in retrospect despite digging everything it's doing aesthetically I just don't think it works - the UI gets in the way of the combat being readable and the writing is on-the-nose in a way that was already dated in 2021 and probably comes off even worse in 2024. There's some decent character beats and I have a lot of empathy for what Love was trying to do here but I don't think she was particularly successful. Between this and Don't Take It Personally it may just be the case that Love is not great at overtly topical writing.

This is quite a charming game all things considered, the writing is a bit over-the-top and the characters do lean hard into LGBTQ+ tropes most if not all of the time, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

The story is goofy and lighthearted in a good way, the characters are cute and endearing in some of the best ways making me excited to come back to it, but what really put me off was the gameplay eventually. While not abhorrent (or even bad in any aspect) I actually think the real-time party-based combat is really fun and inventive in a minor way, making you cycle to use parts of your movekit and so forth. Around when I got the 4th character however, the game slowly became less interesting and less engaging, while the writing kept up, the gameplay just left a lot to be desired, and I made it about halfway before I got sick of the game.

This doesn't mean the game is bad by any means, I do recommend it a lot for lovers of jrpg-enthusiasts as a less-hardcore spin on the genre, but for me it just hit a wall. Overall a good time though and praises.

Coming off arguably the greatest western eroge ever made, I had high hopes and expectations for Love's next project. GItCL didn't hit anywhere near the high marks Ladykiller in a Bind did, but it does manage to be intriguing.

For one, the actual gameplay loop and combat is really fascinating. Its very frenetic, and ends up playing like a quasi-rhythm game as you set up everyone's cards and try to cycle as high as possible. It has a fairly high skill floor to get into, but I ended up really enjoying it once I got into it. I wish I could say the same about the way you actually acquired new skills--which is via a literal gacha--but I got over it even if that aspect was tedious. When you add in honestly the best combat theme of any jrpg in recent years, the actual act of playing the game is really exciting and it was easy for me to get into a flow state of clearing an encounter, driving, then getting into the next one. With a little clean-up of the surrounding systems I would love to see an expansion of this in another project.

What soured the game on me though was...everything else. The dialogue is something atrocious. If you're in on leftie twitter, you know most of the dialogue in the game already. If you're in the specific niche of "lesbian otaku twitter", you know all of it. Its a very weird feeling knowing the punchline to every joke before its said. The plot itself is not uninteresting but never exciting either, and feels very hamstrung by the road trip theming of the game.

Its a big step back from the tight, smart, and incredibly funny writing in LKIB.

And...thats it. This is an odd game where the gameplay is the game but not the game at the same time, and that sort of incongruity makes the game come out worse. I actually think the base game systems as a roguelike would be a wonderful take, and I think a visual novel that could really get into longer-form writing for these characters could also be wonderful. But smashed together...its just odd. I hesitate to even call it bad--I didn't not enjoy my time with the game. But I can't say I enjoyed it either.

Its just weird.

The Adventures of Shinji Ikari, Queen of the Desert
A pleasant RPG that kept tempting me to like it more. The UI is delicious, but a basic item upgrade hides 5 layers deep. The characters are charming, but incapable of addressing fascism in any meaningful way (but oh do they try). The music rules. Full stop. Act 3's descent into depressed soliloquies almost killed the whole thing for me, but GITCL's rhythms are so easy to slip into I can't pretend it was entirely unpleasant. The battle theme is still stuck in my head.

CWs for Get in the Car loser, homophobia, transphobia, nazi iconography, racism, stalking, partner abuse, blood, partner age gaps.

Christine Love's rosy love letter to an era of Square-Enix somehow already lost, Get in the Car Loser throws you right into most genre-y genre thing ever with a mock gacha-fied remix of FF13 smash cut with 15 and random pulls from the rest of the franchise. The UI is lush and intoxicating without leaving genre conventions (the gacha pull screen is right out of KHCoM), but struggles a lot to unify or direct you to the behemoth amount of info coming at you in combat. All of the abilities and their flow are pretty discernable if you're an RPG freak or just a disciplined tool tip reader, but the combat puzzles don't necessarily hold you to learning everything. I have a mostly fun time with this game and did not once need to grind, but it's easy to see where that would happen for most.

Love misses a lot on the political content here (maybe fitting considering the kind of fantasy we're pulling from) but the sense of character when everyone is together and not taking a nose dive to do the worst Eva Instrumentality episode ever is absolutely immaculate.

There's a lot shoujo, JRPGs, slapstick, and YA greatest hits here. It'll all sing if you're willing to give it some space to become discernable, but will understandably be dull to many without the patience.

Christine Love sniper shot me all the way from canada or wherever on this one. Perfect aesthetic/vibes to make me go utterly feral and I loved every moment of it. I think a lot of people get down on the combat and like yeah, it doesnt do a good job explaining what its expectations are. I was pretty deep into the game before it really clicked for me but once it did I ended up having quite a lot of fun. It really asks a lot from the player to meet it on its terms and figure out its interlocking parts. Some people aren't going to be up for that or all the fussing around with menus and thats okay!

5 stars, I won't Falter in the Face of Evil! hits every freakin' time.

The art and the visuals are gorgeous, as are the character designs (help I'm gay).
The music is amazing and manages to stay great even though you hear it over and over and over again.
The writing is amazing. Both the banter between battles and the overall story. I don't think I ever read a trans story as relatable as act 3. The game's political message is great, though the political metaphor could have been a bit better, especially regarding the Divine Order.
But unfortunately, it is still a quite flawed game.
This was Christine Love's first attempt at making a game that isn't a visual novel, there's combat! And unfortunately, I hate the combat.
90% of combat strategy is done while setting up your equipment, 10% is selecting your equipment during combat, and the rest is just button mashing. You can't even settle on one strategy because every rank of items has new different effects that don't necessarily work with what you've been doing so far (I'm sure some people like being pushed towards experimenting. I don't).
There's also no real sense of progression past getting the 4th party member. You have to rank up to keep up with your enemies who are also ranking up. There could have been some progression in the equipment skills, but unfortunately, the skills of a higher rank aren't necessarily stronger than the ones from the rank before. I often even found them weaker.
The DLC somewhat helps with these issues by giving you some equipment that scales as you progress so you have something you can use as your constant core. Unfortunately, you're unable to buy DLC equipment once you finish the DLC and there's no warning of this so I ended up with way less DLC equipment than I would have liked (this appears to have been patched).

Despite this, the game is amazing

For (what I understand to be) her first game with real-time mechanics rather than a visual novel, Christine Love does a really admirable job. When the combat clicks, its fun, fast-paced, and rewarding. Sometimes however, the mechanics can be really opaque. The tutorial could use some work, as it took me quite a few battles to really wrap my head around the combat system.

The pacing was also a big issue, at a certain point I just was not interested in doing the same fight I had done over a dozen times before, acts needed to either have more variety in them or be shorter. Having only 1 song for normal combat was also quite grating, which is saying something because the track in question is REALLY GOOD, but any song played that frequently will grate over time.

Writing is what you have come to expect from Love Conquers All, walks the impossible tightrope of delightfully indulgent and crushingly sincere, the metaphor of the Devil Machine cultists and the Divine Hierarchy are very on the nose but sometimes you fucking have to be, and I do think this is one of those times.

Had a blast overall, very excited to see future releases from this dev.

No rating yet because I've only just started the game, but I feel like anyone looking at this page should be prepared because I think this game has genuinely the least helpful tutorial I've ever seen in ANY video game.

First thing you need to know is that this is an Active-Time Battle game. At no point does it tell you that that's what it is, or explain it if you're like me and have never played an ATB game before. Do not conceptualize of this game as in any sense "turn-based," everything's super-asynchronous and you're gonna hurt yourself trying to think of when "turns" are. It also goes for a real minimal interface where you have one button to make each character in the party act, and what that button does changes when you hit the "Next" button, rotating around the functions that correspond to the gear you've equipped in sequential order, so if you wanna keep on the same move you can just wait for the cooldown timer. The only thing the game ever tells you about the "Next" button that the entire battle interface hinges on is that it skips the cooldown timer, so that you can use it to spam your moves! Like, it's telling you how to exploit its mechanics and not telling you the basics that would allow you to craft your own strategy. And the "Next" button also changes to the "Fate" button every time you make one full rotation through your character's available moves, not just whenever the hell it feels like it, which is how it feels if you have no idea why buttons keep changing what they do on you.

Also, it DOES tell you this (in the item upgrade menu,) but your healing magic only actually applies during battles, and as soon as the battle is over the healing goes away again. Watch out for that. But you can heal at prayer statues at gas stations.

I had to ask friends across three separate Discord servers to be able to piece all that together, because to me who has never played a game structured like this, it all just seemed truly random and inexplicable. You can get through this game's battles on rapid, blind button-mashing alone, like when I was 6 playing Virtua Fighter 2, but it's unsatisfying and I imagine eventually you'd hit a point where you eat insurmountable curb.

Oh, and the other thing the game won't tell you that every player should know is that it REALLY REALLY wants to be played on a controller instead of a keyboard. It almost seems designed to make keyboard users suffer. First, its incredibly awkward default W-Z-A-X layout that makes you turn your hand or keyboard sideways and makes you jam your fingers on top of one another anyway. (Even QZAX would be better!) Second, it combines the "next dialogue" button with the "make Grace do something in battle" button so that you're likely to skip through dialogue by accident during its rapid-fire battles... ONLY on keyboard and not on controller, despite, you know, the preponderance of available keys on a keyboard.

I’m a Final Fantasy XIII sicko so when I found out that Get in the Car, Loser! was heavily inspired by the divisive but unique 2009 JRPG, I raised a brow in curiosity. A lot of indie JRPGs are concerned with “fixing” the typical idea of the genre which has never grabbed my interest. Someone making something inspired by FF13, though? That is a decision. Call me a “l’cie” because playing that game would be my Focus.

Get in the Car, Loser!’s take on FF13’s combat sands off a lot of the extraneous math from the original game’s design and simplifies things, for the better I think. The lack of proper exploration that most JRPGs have makes GITCL snappier. There isn’t a lot of stat math, either. The game gets a lot out of a little and maybe it wears out its mechanics quicker than other RPGs but that’s okay because it’s also a shorter experience, clocking in at about ten hours.

The combat loop took some getting used to but once I wrapped my head around it, I liked shifting through the three boards the game gives you and then topping off a cycle with Grace’s Fate attack. There’s more customization and equipping trinkets to switch up a hero’s moveset is the most drastic (and dynamic) difference between this game and the FF13 that inspired it.

I didn’t like juggling elemental affinities, though. Too often did I restart a battle because I had a Ravage attack the same element as an enemy. On the positive side: healing spells being temporary worked as a good balance between the urgency of combat compared to the long-term strategy of a battle.

On that note, making the protagonist a support character (instead of a mainline fighter) is a nice twist on a JRPG trope. I guess maybe that’s why the story is so focused on personal problems rather than a big fantastic plot? I can’t say I like it, though. There is some cool lore in this game that feels very inspired by later Final Fantasy games, but most of the in-car dialogue is concerned with the anxieties of the characters rather than the plot at hand. I don’t mind a lot of soul-searching– road trip stories typically have their characters be introspective and reflect on things– but the balance is heavy on the contemplation side and not enough on anything else. A lot of the discussion is about queerness and a lot of it was stuff I’ve seen before. It’s took until Act III and Sam to examine her own problematic thoughts for anything to get interesting. The game also employs that “texty” ironic dialogue style unconcerned with correct punctuation and spelling and I am not the person for that.

The villains are modern fascists taken wholesale out of the real world. The game opens with some dickweed harassing Sam with a monologue you could read off of Twitter. I don’t mind these kinds of jagoffs being the villains in the story but it’s extremely blunt with it. The fascists worship the main villain the but the rest of the narrative doesn’t do a good job of tying queerness and fascism to the world-building in a way that feels like a wasted opportunity.

The game’s road trip theming and modernpunk setting feels distinctly inspired by Final Fantasy XV. I like how all the healing items are corner store food like samosas and bottles of iced tea. I like the general style of the game, too. The music’s great. It seems to take more from the Persona games than any Final Fantasy with its funk-soul flavour across many tracks. The vocal track battle themes quickly got stuck in my head and I’m also a big fan of the “Store ‘n’ Gas” theme with its psyched up production.

I complain a lot but this ended up being my favourite new game experience of 2024 and I this is still very much worth checking out even if you are not a FF13 goblin like myself.

I am so conflicted on this game. On one hand it's about a queer roadtrip to defeat fascism, on the other hand, I absolutely cannot get into the combat at all.

For the most part I really enjoy the writing. That meme about writers who use subtext being cowards is totally relevant here.

I particularly enjoyed Act III for diving deep into Sam's psyche. I ran out of steam in Act IV, the final part of the game, against the final boss no less.

The combat system is... very weird to me. I've heard that it's like FFXIII, but as someone who hasn't played many FF games, this doesn't help me at all.

The tutorial is pretty short, and by Act III I had played the game so poorly I soft locked myself. See, I was like 4 levels below the boss I was trying to fight, so they literally instant killed all of my party members constantly, and I didn't have enough money to buy gas so I could keep grinding to level up. This game is weirdly a resource management game with the money in a way I've never felt so oppressed by before. I genuinely had to restart the game from Act I because I had been foolish enough to repeatedly save in the same slot, despite the game offering like 50 save slots or something.

So the second time around I minmaxed leveling as hard as I could... without making myself completely out of money since I could mess up the game again. AND I turned on Story Mode combat difficulty. Which, frankly I find the name a bit offensive. It's not like you can simply button mash your way thru boss encounters on that level, at least not the final one. See, the upgrade system is the whole way you level up, and there's lot of spells and if you don't read them all very carefully you can end up with a pretty shit build. I think that's what happened to me at some point and it was making the game a lot harder.

Sadly, the encounter rate just gets too high, and it literally interrupts party dialogue. Gracefully the game resumes conversations where you left off, but I found myself dreading the interruptions. Even on Story Mode where you apparently get more money, I constantly was running out of money for upgrades if i wanted to keep enough money to not run out of gas and lose the entire game.

Eventually I just looked up a Lets Play to watch the final boss play out. Also, apparently at some point the game was patched to prevent you from using your entire item collection during fights, because it was considered messy/confusing. As far as I can tell this was a massive nerf to your combat ability. You have to constantly remember to restock the items in your 5 slots, and it's hard to balance which items you want to take to each fight. In particular Act III and Act IV bosses have some items you really want to have around and I had to restart both fights because I hadn't taken the right loadout.

Anyways, the writing is definitely cheesy at times, but I like the parallels to fascism, LGBT rights, and ineffective liberal government "status quo" woes. Oh, and all the stuff about social media in Act III again was great.

Sadly, my lasting thought about this game is that it needs a massive balance tuning. Maybe I'm "bad" at the game or something, but it just didn't click and I kept feeling frustrated. I wish this game had just been a visual novel instead.

Sort of lost interest after Act 1.

It's fascinating that it takes so much from FF13, including altering the "hallway" aspect of that game to a literal highway this time. Honestly, I prefer the highway.

The progression system is wild. It's this sort of lovable mess where you are constantly combining/trashing items to level up other items.

The battle system is neat, again FF13-esque, but it does get quite a bit repetitive. I sort of lost steam with it after two hours.

I like how positive and affirming the characters are, however they are a bit excitable for my taste. They are always kind of yelling enthusiastically which was a bit much for me.

This thing is cool! Feels like it should have been a bit shorter. After two hours I felt like I was about 20% done and wanted to be closer to 50% done.

Act I is good vibes: the videogame. That doesn’t mean that it lacks claws, it’s about a journey against obvious fascist, homophobe, transphobe and related figures and ideologies. The game doesn’t even try to hide who is fighting against, and it’s the right call, it would be a bit of a step down to look for some supposed “subtlety” in a game that yearns for justice, or at least the fantasy of it. What’s good is that, having clear who is the enemy, the group just goes by, drive and kick ass, chilling. Realizing on the car that a mysterious godly giant bird is following them and insulting it just in case that it is omnipresent, finishing every combat with a postal card goofy photo, turning the whole screen pink as Grace prepares freezed while “I WON’T FALTER IN THE FACE OF EVIL” is written on giant scratched letters across the screen when the Sword of Fate is used, the escape combat option asking you if you want to “escape to fight another day”, the result screen after escaping telling you that “the only reward for running from a fight is survival”... Even the too repetitive combats get a pass by being mostly avoidable (not exactly a compliment, I know) and being very active, without pauses.

This energy is lost entering act II onwards. The now not tutorialized combat shows that it doesn't take off, worsened by an even more insisting encounter pace. The little cute details get caught too in repetition and lose their significance soon. Probably the worst one, the carefree talk on the road is now drained by thoughts about how the villains view them, when not the villains doing the monologues themselves, what before asked to be responded with a fist in the mouth now takes its time to fade away the charm. But this does come to some sense.

If I don’t care about any lack of subtlety is because one of the things I appreciate the most, in general, is honesty. Not that being honest is always enough, but I feel that I need some of it if only to be on the basis. Act III, the more direct one, takes the hateful villain ideas and explores how it affects Sam along the way in full introspection. An exploration that is clunky, not only for the still present combat, now being more disruptive than before, but also the constant humor not being in place at all and the overall presentation forgetting about the senses. Yet, I appreciate the pause to explore the doubts and fears of a queer hero, insecurities that for sure have been discussed way too many times before and probably better, and still a sincere action above all. If this queer battle wants to take any chance to win it must fight nihilism as well. Against the “nothing really matters”, care about the individual. Random people posting online that you should not exist and the likes are interesting subjects to care about as evident or small as they may seem, after all, those thoughts do come from somewhere real, and that's the frightening part. Is this confession then enough in spite of everything? Ironically, to be honest, I understand the soul, but I don't feel it as much.

An amazing queer story about fighting fascists. I felt seen by so many aspects of this story. It's a fairly simple narrative, but a refreshing one. The soundtrack is simply amazing, and the combat music doesn't get repetitive even though it's a fairly short loop. The combat itself is very repetitive and there is next to no sense of character progression, as you literally throw away your old build every time you level up. It's understandable coming from a developer that hasn't worked with combat before, but it's a bit of a shame.

I wanted to like this more than I did. There’s so so so much I love in this game, the palette, the pixel art, the themes, the characters, the dialogue. On paper this game ought to be one of my favourites of all time, and I do love it, but the reality fell a little short.

The writing is very very good and the protagonists all feel real, fun and distinct. Basically the entire game is these four shooting the shit and it’s a testament to the writing style that they remain fun and engaging throughout. There’s a lot of the writing that speaks to me, a lot of the trans stuff that sounds like it’s coming from my own head, but for all the familiarity nothing really blew my mind. I did think the style of chapter 3 was just amazing, smashed it out of the park.

Mechanically, the game is super dense and complex. Initially you have a small set of abilities to choose from for equipment but this expands out as the game goes on, and I spent ages poring over my loadouts trying to get what was right. However, for all the time spent on it, I never really got a feeling of mastery, no eureka moments where it came together. A few times I felt like I was abandoning decent combos because they’d been outleveled, or muddling through.

The in-battle tactics felt much harder to perceive. Only at the very end of the game did I vaguely have separate dedicated pages for ravaging and damaging, and most of the time I just mashed through and tried to remember which page had healing. Most fights I had my eyes glued to the top right hand corner of the screen, watching health bars and cooldowns, and I got burned for that several times.

But there’s so much promise, so many clever ideas. Mulching old gear to upgrade the new stuff is genius, and the little road-story vignettes attached to all the items were a treat. The way the game moves between dialogue and combat but somehow (at least for me) you never lose the thread is amazing.

One other thing, and it’s hard to call this a positive or a negative, but I found the game to require a huge amount of focus. There was never really any point in GITCL where I could pop a podcast on and grind out some battles or sneak in 5 minutes’ play between meetings. Every moment of the game is either spent laser focused on the dialogue, or hammering buttons in the combat, or thinking hard about your loadout. The DLC is the only place that really lets you muck about.

The game is very good and was packed end to end with good ideas, they just don’t come together quite as well as I had hoped. Still a big fan and plan to play all the DLCs.

I expected this to be a super fun queer-as-hell audiovisual treat, and it is that with all the lovely dialogue I hoped for, but what I didn't expect was getting the greatest piece of antifascist art that gaming has produced. Get in the Car, Loser is absurdly direct and makes no attempt to hide its messaging. It knows that when the shit hits the fan like it has in the real world, the fight against evil has to be proactive. When it's violent and carries the threat of violence on an even more massive scale, we've gone past the point where rational debate maintaining ideologically pure pacifism are enough. It is a fight, and while GitCL makes a point not to encourage pointless bloodlust, it recognizes that we can't ignore what's been put in front of us. The fight must be fought.

It's so gay. It's so pretty. The tunes are incredible. The battle system is really novel (though I will admit, not explained very well by the game). I just want to hear these characters' banter go on and on and on. This game is made for the internet-raised who got front-row seats to the surge in reactionary garbage in the 2010s that got us to where we are today. It's for the queers intimately familiar with our enemy, many of us barely escaping getting sucked into their world. I've never seen such a grand production made for MY people in the spirit of OUR time. GOD I love this. I cried at the wave of triumph as I defeated the Machine Devil and I'm still recovering from the emotional weight of that success.

Played through Proton on Linux. I'm going to start putting this message on things unless/until an option is added to Backloggd.

I WON'T FALTER IN THE FACE OF EVIL!