Laura Michet's Blog

You gotta check out Wheel World

Wheel World!!!! Wheel World!!!! The biking game!!! It's out!!

I like it a lot! It's got some really fun racing and bike part swapping stuff in it - it really is possible to "design" a bike for a specific course and get way better at it, which is I guess the dream for a game like this, haha. You really can build a bike out of parts that give you boosts for rolling through a bush and then defeat the race in the woods where all the bushes are. You really can find a race that goes all downhill and then slam your downhill aero parts on the bike and see a performance boost. It's fun to do this!

The thing that I'm having the most fun with right now, however, is the massive amount of in-joke bike jokes dredged deep from the mines of Online. This entire game sounds like the xbiking subreddit and the bicyclingcirclejerk subreddit - two places where people post a lot of self-parodic memey stuff about bike gear. The language these online communities use is all over the game. It's so much fun to see a scene I know so much about reflected with such precision - I feel like some of these jokes would not even be VISIBLE to people who did not recognize the phrasing, or recognize the bike gear the game is making fun of.

20250723221949_1

20250723222001_1

20250723230040_1

20250723232834_1

20250723221435_1

20250723234807_1

20250724001317_1

I don't mean to say that you cannot enjoy this game if you don't know a lot about English-language bike culture. It is delightful, the racing is fun, and I think people who bike even a little bit will get the appeal of a toylike rural European fantasy land filled to the brim with goblinlike, multicolored cyclists relentlessly undermining themselves.

But if you do care a lot about bikes, you really gotta play this one immediately. It feels like a game that people made about themselves, without worrying that anyone would understand. It knows the vibe will carry you whether you get the joke or not.

#bicycles #games #recommendations #wheel_world