Vroom

When Vroom loads and you see those chunky pixelated cars racing down a road that wobbles terribly, you suddenly understand why raycasting was used for first-person driving. But this isn't Wolfenstein — it's a stab at a racing simulator from 1994, when you could do absolutely anything on PC and nobody really knew what would stick.

Vroom throws you behind the wheel of various tuned cars and sends you down tracks that look like maps from a Doom engine having an epileptic seizure. You drive the classic way — arrow keys or WASD — you've got gas, brakes, a handbrake for drifts, and you need to make it through the track either against the clock or against other cars. Nothing overly complicated here. The physics are more conceptual — the car behaves like an object from physics textbooks written thirty years ago, which is pretty weird.

The problem? The visual speed feels insane. That fake 3D effect the game uses to simulate motion is so wild you have to acclimate to it like you would Descent, except you can't fly up and down. After a while you get used to it, but for the first five minutes you feel stoned. The tracks twist at horrible angles, obstacles pop up randomly, and the whole thing feels more like gambling with math than actually driving a car.

Still, there's something bold about it. Vroom wants to act like a simulator in its own way — there's feedback, variable tracks, different cars. In the '90s, when racing games were either arcade masterpieces (Type R, Crash) or light toys, this was a weird thing in the middle. The graphics are ugly, but they have clear intent. Music? Barely any. The engine sounds are so synthetic that aliens could use them to communicate.

Today Vroom is a curiosity — an attempt at something that didn't exist. It's not a good game, it's not a bad game. It's an experiment that hit the physical limits of DOS raycasting technology and lost. But if you want to experience that strange feeling of sitting in a car that handles like it's being controlled from the moon, Vroom is waiting in your browser. Just trust that it's not your monitor glitching.