Game EXP: Car Quest (NS)

Car Quest

Systems: Nintendo Switch, Windows,

Release Date: October 25, 2018

Publisher: Ezone PTY LTD

Developer: Ezone PTY LTD

Time Spent: 9 Hours 42 Minutes 23 Seconds

Highlight Playthrough on YouTube

Playing and completing Car Quest took me an embarrassing long amount of time, and I don't just mean the nine hours and 42 minutes.  I first bought and started Car Quest on December 23, 2018, and only just beat it on Monday (August 18th, 2025).  I only played for about 15 minutes and got a feel for the gist of the game, and then apparently stopped to play (checks notes) a whole slough of games I picked up as part of the now-defunct #IndieSelect, created by IndieGamerChick to help promote indie games initially on Xbox Live Aracade, but evolved to be across various platforms. And I have no explanation as to why I didn't return to it.  New Gift Syndrome (formally Christmas Present Syndrome because there's already a CPS that's more important), I guess.

It wasn't until May 28th of this year of our sanctimonious president that I started Car Quest again when I sorted the digital games on the Switch by chronological date purchased and thought, "Yeah, I should play Car Quest.  It's only a 7.5-hour (read 8+ hours for me) game, I could knock that out in a week or two."  Well, three months and 9.7 hours later, I have returned and have mixed feelings about Car Quest.  I mean, I guess if you know what you're doing, you can beat the game in just over three hours.  Or in under 30 minutes if you're playing on a higher-end system and you're just better at those waddle-skips.

Throughout my time playing Car Quest, I found that I could only play for about 30 minutes at a time, and only one of those times did I actually get motion sick (car sick???).  The game runs well on the original Switch, the Switch OLED, and the Switch 2, so I know it wasn't due to any optimization issues.  I think part of it was due to the general gameplay loop of remembering where the last artifact I found unlocked, figuring out where that location was, collecting enough batteries to open the (next) portal, collecting those batteries (because I apparently wasn't great at either collecting or maintaining a supply of batteries)*, and then passing through and exploring the new area.  Some of the areas you go to were manageable and could be completed within that 30-minute gameplay loop, but others, like the ice world, the island world, and the ocean world, were all pretty large and required more time than I felt like I could give in a single sitting.  

This is one of my biggest gripes with Car Quest, and maybe it's really just me, that I couldn't play for an extended period.  I could play The Elder Scrolls Online until the battery died on the Steam Deck, or Tears of the Kingdom for literally hours, but with Car Quest, I just felt I was losing interest a lot faster than other expansive adventure games that were (more or less) about collecting pieces and unlocking new areas.  That's a purely subjective take, however, and doesn't actually reflect the quality of the game overall.  My only other issue was how the game would show you where the relic you just collected unlocked the next area, and trying to determine where specifically the location is, as the camera literally flies through the world, passing through buildings.  Getting your bearings, especially in the early game as you've unlocked larger swaths of the map but are still trying to figure out where everything is, frequently feels a bit taxing mentally.  Perhaps an aerial view could've been accomplished, although that method might've been too complicated.

The rest of the game, I have nothing but good things to say.  The driving felt good and intuitive, although I never felt like I had a great grasp on the drifting mechanic, which is probably why some of the challenges to drive over plates/markers on the ground in a specific time and/or specific order gave me so much grief.  The animation of the King of Blocktaria was wonderfully done to show such a wide variation of expressions and emotions, as well as wonderfully voice-acted to be helpful but also endearingly annoying.  And the click-clack sound of those batteries is audible serotonin boosts, which is probably why in the early game I was collecting each and every one I came across; I also didn't realize that they respawned.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Blind Eyes of Old Light

*There was also a spat of time when The Squire wanted to play Car Quest, and he thought it was hilarious to drive off the edges of the world to watch the car explode into what presumably were the 25 batteries it drained from you in order to respawn.  So there were quite a few times I would turn the game on only to find that I was down to fewer than 10 batteries.  So I had to go collecting again.

And tangentially related, I was always super annoyed when I had to drive over a sequence of plates on the ground in a specific order or in a certain amount of time to unlock a portal, only to find out that I was five batteries shy of being able to enter; usually for portals that required 150-250 batteries.  So the portal would close up, and I'd have to go find enough batteries to pass through the portal, but only after completing the often aggravating unlocking sequence again.

P.S.  I did have to use a YouTube walkthrough (the same one I linked above by SolarPellets) for the endgame when you're driving around collecting the museum artifacts.  I just couldn't remember the location of the specific portals to the ice world and the beach world since it had been a while since I was at those locations.