Whilst I do recommend the Playables series as a whole, there was one game I had totally missed by accident. CARS is a short, 10 to 15-minute art piece that revolves around the player clicking various swarms of cars around the screen. This often forces them into a giant black hole and free-falling to their doom. Entertaining? Yes! Sound familiar? Also, yes.
CARS follows the exact same setup and message about social conformity and consumerism as KIDS. In that game, you’d send kids running around in groups with your mouse, diverting running lanes into black holes and watch them sacrifice themselves. Elsewhere you’d call out the kid being the odd one out. Both of these types of observational puzzles carry across to CARS and play in the exact same manner. The player clicks and drags their cursor around the screen, influencing the direction of traffic. Sometimes you’ll watch cars elegantly fall through an abyss. A few odd-one-out puzzles are either visual or based around a honking horn mechanic, and those horns get loud and annoying very quickly.
CARS feels almost like a direct copycat, and there is hardly anything new here that wasn’t already done in KIDS. The thing is, watching 100 kids throw themselves into an abyss is far more powerful than watching 100 cars drive into one. Maybe the fact that it’s so close to the original in the series is part of the point, but I struggle to recommend CARS unless you grab it as part of the Playables bundle. The series works better as a collective because the games are variations on the same theme. Basing CARS on its own, KIDS is the better version of this art piece. Get that instead.
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