I was intrigued when Steam notified me of an update to a very small game I bought several years ago. Rolling Hamster came out back in 2021 and I bought it on release, but it didn’t gel on the first play. I parked it – fully intending to return at a later time and thankfully that Steam notification triggered me to do just that. The notification was that Rolling Hamster added controller support nearly four years after its release. Now was a good time to rejoin this cute-looking racer.
Rolling Hamster is a one-button racing game. Original for keyboard, but now with controllers, up to 4 players can take control of a hamster riding a giant wheelbarrow-shaped three-wheeler. Whilst you cannot steer, you can press a button to move forward and when the hamster approaches a corner, lifting off the button slows the hamster down. When the hamster slows, it tries to turn to stay on the track, meaning you have to point and squirt your way around tighter corners and hairpins. Most of the 15 circuits are very flowing tracks where coasting around corners rather than flat out stopping to turn is the fastest way around. After 3 laps whoever crosses the line first wins.
When I say “tries to turn” – I mean that literally, as this is where the cute and bumbly nature of Rolling Hamster becomes utter marmite. The game has a low gravity physics base, with low grip to match. The wheelbarrow trikes skid, spin, understeer and fly off the road constantly. This isn’t a problem around kinks and soft bends but anything that requires a proper turn becomes a nightmare for any racing fan. If you are in the lead, you’ll need your hamster to stop. Second place, unable to steer to avoid you, smashes into the leader, usually shoving them off the track. Third smashes into second and probably launches over the top as second place is now facing the wrong way and so third place flies off track too. That lets last place through to take the lead by going a little slower and carefully. This problem persists on any track with hairpins, 90-degree bends or switchbacks. It turns Rolling Hamster into a chaotic party game because you cannot race cleanly. I came to Rolling Hamster as a racing game first and cute chaotic physics explosion second. I wasn’t impressed or amused and in the end, I found it quite frustrating. Where you sit on the chaos vs racing spectrum will decide if you’ll like this game or not.
Outside of the moment-to-moment racing, there is little else to discuss. There is only a single race, and no campaigns or leagues. Every track has an online leaderboard for race times which is nice but wildly dependent on not being smashed off track by the AI as if you don’t have 4 players, the AI fills in the remaining slots so you always have 4 racers. The one really good design point is that the camera is dynamic and swirling. This means that if the players get spread out, the camera does a great job of keeping everyone in shot without splitting the screen. It doesn’t help with the floaty driving and lack of control but at least you can see all the crashing! I wish the game hadn’t committed to the one-button gameplay and taken on a more Scalectrix approach, allowing you to switch lanes and hover on the accelerator to modulate speed around a corner. That way you could have chaos and a race too. This way just feels haphazard. Yes, technically you can try to stop your hamster on the inside or outside of a corner but the floatiness of the physics and lack of grip makes it incredibly imprecise and difficult to achieve. It is at odds with providing accessible controls too.
Whilst the overarching aesthetic is cute, chunky and malleable, playing Rolling Hamster is like trying to guide an imprecise drunken missile. It can be fun if no one is taking a blind bit of notice that there is a race going on but as soon as you want to think of skills and racing each other, the game falls apart. For the younger or more party-focused crowd only.
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