Chain smoking and chugging beers are the only ways I can handle being chased by a bear who wants to to tear my ramshackle motor home apart in RV There Yet?

God, no wonder my little podgy bloke in RV There Yet? smokes so much. I'd be caning a pack a day too if I had to direct a rickety old motor home over canyons, barely bridged together by planks of wood, while being chased down by a blood-thirsty bear.

That's basically the gist of what I had to deal with when diving into my first trip alongside fellow PCG writers Kara and Elie: a Peak-adjacent co-op adventure where—instead of climbing up treacherous mountains and fighting for survival—we're forced to haul a metal piece of crap over rocky terrain and down narrow winding paths to reach our destination.

The whole thing's a game jam put together by Nuggets Entertainment, so things are a little janky right now. I regularly found myself clipping out of the RV which almost spelled my death on a couple of occasions, items we'd packed along for the trip would randomly vanish, and I sometimes would end up defying gravity when grabbing the winch, leaving me floating around in mid-air.

But despite its rough edges, the whole thing is darn fun. After packing the RV with epi-pens (for untimely deaths), beers (for strength), and a cassette tape (for the love of the game), I made the terrible decision to take the wheel for the first leg of the journey. Fun fact about me: I can't drive! Never learned, the entire concept scares me to death.

So imagine my surprise when I'm greeted with a gearstick, a clutch, and absolutely no idea what to do. I switched the engine on and began to totter along in first gear, getting some on-the-fly coaching from Kara (who, unlike me, can actually drive) while Elie manned the roof, keeping an eye out for the path ahead and any tight turns.

Driving in RV There Yet? is not for the faint of heart. I regularly lost sight of which way I was supposed to be going next—turns out trying to navigate a giant motor home as my first foray into vehicular travel is a terrible idea—but with Kara peering at the map and Elie on the rough, we soon made it to our first checkpointed shack. I take a drag of my ciggie and flick it onto the dashboard. That was stressful.

There's plenty of stuff to pick up at these stops: scrap metal to repair any dinks to the RV, additional survival tools, and extra cassette tapes with a lot of yapping taking place on 'em. As the more experienced driver of the two of us, I hand Kara the wheel and instead decide to become a secondary lookout.

What had been a relatively calm drive up until now did not remain that way for very long. We come across our first bridge and I jump out in an attempt to direct Kara across it. For some demented reason, I also grab the winch. I fall through a gap in the bridge. Soon after, the RV veers off and also ends up falling, now suspended midair thanks to the winch I am still holding onto for dear life.

As the responsible one, Elie is doing their best to try and get a handle on the situation… until a bear shows up right in their face, and we all meet our early demise.

The nice thing about RV There Yet? is that you're not thrown straight back to the beginning like Peak, but are instead teleported back to the last shack you encountered. A little bit of gearing up, and we're off again. This time we encountered the bear again, all within (what we thought was) the safety of the RV. The RV is not safe. The bear tears off the roof and within a matter of seconds the entire vehicle is totalled. Back to the shack once more.

On our third run, things go considerably better. I've become a master at using the winch to get the RV out of sticky situations, while carefully monitoring our health bars—which work similarly to Peak, various segments cutting into both our health and the health of our vehicle. Sometimes the RV needs topping up with a bit of motor oil to keep going, or a quick tire change. I'm constantly fighting the accidental fall damage I keep taking. Everything is fine.

I continue to puff away at my cigarettes–which give a nice bonus of a temporary speed boost—while chugging the occasional beer for a little extra strength. We, regrettably, still do not make it very far despite performing significantly better. But was it fun? You bet it was.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Nuggets Entertainment does with RV There Yet? after a little extra polish—which the developer says is coming along with nice features like keybinds, controller support and eventual Steam Deck verification. In the meantime, perhaps I should brush up on how to actually drive a car, lest I have to have another impromptu virtual driving lesson once more.