Imagine the Gran Turismo National B License 1 Test. It’s a task where you simply must accelerate a car and then bring it to a full stop within the marked area. A simple task.

Now what if that same premise has to be done with a wackier simulation engine. And keep adding obstacles upon obstacles between the car and the parking spot. Remove the ostentatious waft, add a chirpy cute aesthetic, make the car turn real good and that’s what you get with You Suck At Parking.

You Suck At Parking went nuts with throwing at you so many goofy, silly and devilishly cheeky gimmicks to stop you from parking a car. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, but can be borderline frustrating at times.

Presentation

You Suck At Parking has a very chirpy, bright presentation. The cars are all chibi-sized and stylised with its customisation options less about putting big wings but rather putting big hats. The soundscape is inviting and chill. All in all, just very pleasant to look at. Other than the game insisting over and over that you suck at parking, it’s all good vibes.

Speaking of which, if there’s a critique to be made, is that it could use a bit more variety in the soundtrack. One music per biome (two if you count the hub music) is a bit too repetitive, especially for players like me that may end up stuck in the first three hours on the same biome. It was a relief to know that there are different music playing on the next biome, but I have mixed feelings on that other song because it has a nice aethereal chant the repeats over and over, and it says, well, “You suck at parking”. A beautiful tune taunting you on your parking prowess, fun!?

There might be some visual clippings and small peculiar parts of the map flickering, slight bugs, but the overall direction of the audio/visual presentation here is solid.

Also, shoutout to the starting screen, which brilliantly and thoroughly encapsulates the vibe and premise of the game. Seeing the title getting wrecked as 30 or so cars try their best to hurl themselves into the parking spot very badly as you see the physics objects just sputter about is so satisfying.

Gameplay

As explained earlier, the goal in You Suck At Parking is for you to prove the title wrong and be good at parking cars. It’s simple, drive the car into the parking spot. Just getting one tyre touching inside the rectangle is enough- for reasons that will be made clear later.

You can only drive forward and brake- there’s no reverse, go to the settings menu in the controls option and you’ll see the option to bind a button for reverse is replaced by the text “Reverse is for the weak”.

Once the car stops, you can’t accelerate anymore and you hop onto another spawning car. And it will eventually stop- there ‘s a “fuel” meter, which actually is more of a timer- you can’t fuel save.

Park the cars in all the parking spots- levels can have around 2 to 5 spots- and the game will admit that You Rock At Parking. Complete them without using any more cars than they are parking spots and you get the elusive Perfect Park.

Simple, but here’s where the fun begins. As you progress through the 100 levels, you will encounter many, many, obstacles to ensure you that getting to that primo empty parking spot is going to be a challenge.

Twisting turns and jumps are tricky, but will be the least of your troubles as you progress further. You have to deal with traffic, comically huge magnets and extending punching gloves, the cops, portals, ice beams that turns the car into ice cube, artillery strikes, homing mines and missiles, just to name a few.

Somehow, with each group of level, the gimmick obstacles being introduced gets wilder and wilder. And that doesn’t count the levels that mix in a bunch of these obstacles together.

Also, each car must remain in the parking spot throughout the course of that level. It’s possible that due to physics shenanigans, or for some reason you hit your own parked car from before, that the parked cars move away- and the game will go “oh no!” and require to go park another car at the spot. It also works the other way around. As long as one tyre of the car is in the parking spot, regardless of what condition it is, that counts as a park car, even if it’s more of a scrap heap than anything.

The levels are challenging. It ranges from devilishly tricky to diabolically nasty. Early levels are a bit loose where it’s easy to spot where to cut corners and find, to use a speedrunning term here, skips, to reach the parking. Later levels will do its very best to make you realise that you do, indeed, suck at parking. I mean when you have to contend with homing missiles, tight turns without touching the barriers of doom and work with a timer, it’s to be bad at parking.

The car physics is very playful. You can rip around doing donuts and J-turns very easily, and can do 90-degree turns rather sharply. But it’s easy to lose control when the car has to jump, it becomes floaty and unstable and can be prone to flipping over. The game is played at a top-down view with a fixed camera angle, so depth perception adds to the challenge. You’d think you are driving the car straight, but when you realise you were a bit off you’re probably careening way off to land on the platform on the other end of the jump.

There will be a lot of moments where you feel like the game is a bit unfair. Some levels can feel like the developers have playtested them to death and have made them so tight that there’s very little room for error. It can be a frustrating challenge trying to wrangle a loose thread (the car) through a very tight needle, and it often feels that way where every slight error is punished too hard. Trying to get Perfect Parks in the first biome was painful, moreso because it feels doable. The second one? Good luck, I give up knowing for the better than subjugating myself into parking nightmare.

Content

You Suck At Parking has about 100 levels for its solo campaign (with two biomes) which should net you around 5 hours of play- more if you are going to complete more levels and get Perfect Parks. Don’t scoff at the hour count thinking it’s a “short” game, this game is really meaty for sort-of-puzzle-driving game. There’s plenty of variety that will not make you feel bored, or felt it stretched itself too thin.

There’s also rotation of unique maps for the multiplayer mode.

And yes there is a multiplayer mode where like in real life you must compete for parking space. Or rather, complete the level first by parking at all the spots, or be the player the parked the most cars. Still, there is a possibility where you can nudge, or be nudged, by other players just before the game confirms your parking counts. So you can be a bit cheeky and make others annoyed in some ways. Thankfully once the game counts the car to be parked, it sticks, so no you cannot be trolling everyone on the lobby by repeatedly denying them a car park.

Multiplayer has no cross-play unfortunately, and only via matchmaking (friend parties in multiplayer mode is coming at a later date), which is a shame. Hopefully cross-play will be something added in the future. But more levels will be added for both the solo campaign and multiplayer mode.

Rather curiously, You Suck At Parking has a paid Season Pass (battle pass), where you gain XP to unlock new cosmetics. Some unlockable cosmetics are free for everyone, but most require you to buy the pass. You can customise your car with silly hats and paint schemes, but there’s no unlocks tied to the solo campaign- it’s all based on Season Pass unlocks, worryingly.

I am honestly not sure if You Suck At Parking can find an audience to support a live service model like this. But I like to be proven wrong on this.

Personal Enjoyment

You Suck At Parking have made me giggling like mad for its silliness, and also made me went on the deep end for how challenging its later levels can be. It’s simple fun, but you can also see the devs have also gotten too much fun and went overboard with designing the levels.

Maybe it’s the way the level is grouped is the issue. The way it works is that a level group introduces you to one gimmick obstacle, which starts from easy to nasty hard. If you play by completing each level group to completion, you’re getting a wild rollercoaster ride of difficulty spikes and dips.

You can approach the levels in different orders, but there’s going to some weird person (me, I’m that weird person) who insists that completing each level within the group before moving on to the next is the way it should be done, and be worse off by doing so.

But putting that aside, the sheer creativeness of the levels trying to make you suck at parking is commendable. I am astonished by the sheer amount of ludicrous things the game can throw at you to make your attempts to be a master parker fail. The level designs might be too evil for me, but objectively they are well-designed, creative, and makes you go wow that they can make this many while still feeling fresh.

Verdict

You Suck At Parking rocks. It can be difficult and downright evil when you go deeper into this physics-based driving game puzzler, but the journey to get there will be full of laughs. It’s a refreshing way of using cars as a vehicle of gameplay, and the multiplayer has potential to be a great time with friends- the mode works great for now.

You don’t need to be a car person to enjoy this crazy ride. And if you have Game Pass, it’s definitely worth trying out the first few levels to see parking cars in near impossible situations are your thing.

Reviewed on PC. Review code provided by the publisher.