The Stack

Truck Quest is a social satire, almost a political cartoon. But it’s served on a substrate of choice-based trucking sim. You know, the same sort of thing as in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and the like, but greatly simplified. You get to choose missions of varying difficulty, the harder ones paying more, then you make some kind of arbitrary choice about your approach (go fast and risk accidents, or go slow and risk being late, sort of thing). Make enough money, and you can pay off your loans and upgrade to a bigger truck that can haul larger loads for more money. Independence. Entrepeneurialism. The American dream.

Except it quickly becomes clear that just trucking will make you money at a dismally slow rate, and you’ll make much better progress if you take on shady side missions from a series of caricatures: a hedge fund manager, a paranoid cyber-warrior, a big-government technocratic politician. Unlike the trucking, these missions are non-interactive and never fail. What’s more, they’re exaggeratedly effective: completing them alters the zeitgeist. Do missions for the hedge fund manager, for example, and people in general become more profit-minded and greedy. Do missions for the privacy advocate, and people become less engaged with their community.

Thinking about it afterward, I think the game missed an opportunity by not having the cultural mood affect the details of the trucking missions you’re offered. Or maybe it did, and it just didn’t make it obvious enough for me to notice.

At any rate, the piece makes its points mainly by showing you what doesn’t change. Between missions, you can talk your trucking mentor, Joan, who had to retire for medical reasons. No matter what changes you wreak on the political climate, Joan can tell you why it’s bad for her and her neighbors. Then there’s Smilin’ Dan, who runs the truck dealership. He sets the terms, gouges you at ruinous interest rates, and then, when you’ve finally made your last payment and own your truck free and clear, he secretly sets fire to it. (It’s pointed out on a few occasions that his name isn’t “Honest Dan” or “Empathetic Dan”.) Smilin’ Dan doesn’t care what the reigning ideology is, because none of the options challenge his power to run roughshod over you.

At one point, a waitress at a truck stop proudly announces that she’s decided to become a trucker herself. The sensible option at that point is to warn her not to do it, to get out while she still can.

So is it a South-Park-like nihilism, where every possible option is equally bad and all you can do about it is point out how bad it all is? Almost, perhaps, but the good ending, which involves exposing the grisly secrets behind a large tech company’s self-driving truck technology, has society reforming around new cooperation between all the factions. The real problem, the author seems to be saying, is imbalance.

It’s just about the least convincing part of the game. The entire scenario is basically an argument against capitalism, but since the author doesn’t trust governmental power, they don’t see socialism as a viable alternative. So instead we get a kind of redeemed capitalism, capitalism purged of its flaws. But the capitalism we see for the rest of the game, capitalism with its flaws exaggerated, looks a lot more familiar.