Galactic Racer Langsung Mengajarkan Pelajaran Sulit Kepadaku, Dan Aku Harus Menghormatinya

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is getting well-deserved plaudits for its tense high-speed arcade racing action and an inventive roguelite structure that fits the genre like Vader's black glove. I have yet to complete the single-player campaign, but before I even realized it was a roguelite, the Star Wars racing game earned my respect with a statement of intent. Namely: It let me fail almost immediately.

As you may know if you've been following coverage including Jordan Ramée's excellent review, the campaign is not simply a linear sequence of races tied together with a story. Instead, it uses roguelike hooks, which means you earn permanent upgrades across runs, but mostly build your strategy as you go with the options given to you at any given time. At any point, you can crash out--sometimes literally--and fail to advance further in the story for that run. You proceed to lick your wounds, cash in for any permanent upgrades you might want, and then start again.

This is an unexpectedly brilliant gameplay loop for an arcade racer, a genre which was always built around high-stakes fun and the tension that you could easily lose your progress and your quarters. But my first time through, I didn't really know all of that. So when I chose my second race, an Elimination event where I had to finish in the top three or get washed out completely, I felt confident that it would take it easy on me as a beginner. Surely this game wouldn't immediately eliminate me on only my second race?

Reader, it would. And it did. In fact, after a slow start, I was one of the very first racers eliminated. I barely even got off the starting block.

For a few scary moments I thought I had lost progress in some irretrievable way that would come back to haunt me. But once I understood Galactic Racer's roguelite structure, that fear dissipated. I respect the commitment to allowing me to fail.

Galactic Racer is built around the fantasy of racing in Star Wars. As Jordan noted, this fantasy involves seemingly immortal fighter jocks strapping themselves into rickety death machines and slingshotting their way through tiny crevices. The very idea should seem reckless and absurd. By allowing me to crash out almost immediately after starting, Galactic Racer expressed that concept to me more clearly than any story cutscene could.