My Summer Car, the absurdly detailed Finnish life sim about vehicle maintenance and drinking in your underpants, smashes into 1.0 after nearly a decade in Steam early access

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Oddball Finnish life-sim My Summer Car has officially launched out of early access, after nine years spent tinkering with its engine and getting drunk on the sofa.

As noticed by RPS, My Summer Car surprise launched its 1.0 version earlier this week. Originally lurching onto Steam early access in 2016, My Summer Car defined itself with two key features, namely its preposterous difficulty, and its unrelenting weirdness. It challenged players with building not just a car from scratch, but the engine as well, all while being so dirt poor you’re likely to starve to death before you figure out how to put one of the car’s doors on.

It’s also one of those games that includes a button for having a wee, in part because it dedicates a large portion of its systems to replicating the Finnish drinking culture of pantsdrunk, which, just in case you don’t speak Finnish, refers to the act of drinking in your pants. Other quintessentially Finnish activates you can embark upon include going to the Sauna, going lake fishing with a big crate of beer and, if you can actually get your car up and running, participating in a local rally.

My Summer Car is by no means a game for everyone. In fact, it probably isn’t a game for most people. The new launch trailer openly states "This game is not fun" before proceeding to explain why for over two minutes. Nonetheless, there are clearly enough people out there who jive with its rejection of many video game norms, having garnered a 'Very Positive' Steam rating out of over 77,000 reviews.

Curiously, while My Summer Car has been in development for a long time, it’s also been more or less feature-complete for much of that period. Developer Amistech Games stated My Summer Car was “gearing toward final stages of the development” as far back as 2020, with only small and sporadic updates since. The most recent update’s changelog includes notes such as "Added a splat effect to helmet when getting hit by a Bee" and "Wasp can now come in if House doors are being kept open." Side note, I hate it when Wasp come in House. Hopefully there is a splat effect for Wasp when hit with rolled-up copy of PC Gamer magazine.

That same announcement also tells players to "stay tuned" for updates on My Summer Car’s scarcely referenced sequel My Winter Car, which Amistech says remains "under active development". And while My Summer Car will no longer receive any "major feature changes" players can expect "important patches and changes whenever necessary" in the future.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.