Turn Right

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)