Sulky Racer

About this game

Sulky Racer is a short, replayable arcade game about driving a pony and trap down an Irish back road while the traffic comes at you the wrong way. It is built on one rule: a single hit from anything solid ends the run, so the game is entirely about how close you are willing to cut it.

Scoring rewards nerve. Skimming past a car in the next lane builds a multiplier that climbs to eight and decays if you play it safe, with the game grading each pass from CLOSE ONE up through SKETCHY! to MENTAL!. Running to the empty far lane keeps you alive and keeps you poor, which is the tension the whole thing runs on. Coins weave across the lanes in paths that only ever step one lane at a time, so a full line is always collectable if you are prepared to take a worse racing line to get it.

What is out there

Potholes and cones do not kill you. They stumble the pony, leaving the steering sluggish for a moment and wiping your combo, and late in a run when every lane is blocked the pothole becomes the good option. A lucky horseshoe absorbs one hit, a bag of oats doubles points and boosts speed for six seconds, deer bound out from the verge, and tractors with trailers shut a lane for nearly twice as long as a car. Some oncoming drivers bottle it and swerve out of your way, horn blaring.

It comes with chunky pixel art, a synthesised trad jig, a leaderboard and a share card. Yer Man, the lad in the cap leaning on the gate, roars at you through the countdown and offers his analysis when the run ends against a Corolla.

A note on the subject

Sulky racing on public roads is a real and genuinely dangerous hazard. The game is aimed at the absurdity of the traffic scenario rather than at any community, the driver is a faceless cartoon seen from behind, and a disclaimer plus a link to the Road Safety Authority is shown on first load and always reachable from the splash screen.