In Slackers – Carts of Glory, you have a big problem: You’re out of beer but the grocery store closes in mere minutes. To further complicate things, you don’t have a car or a bike, just a shopping cart with enough WD40 on its wheels to break the sound barrier. So, with no better choice, you must mount the metal stead and hill bomb your way to glory. Ergo, the subtitle.
Accomplishing this feat is as difficult and dangerous as it sounds, with your hoody-wearing shopping kart pilot more often than not being thrown into tree trunks or over cars in ways that would be horrific if not for the game’s cartoon style. However, for all the failures I experienced while shredding down the hills of suburban neighborhoods and rural highways, Carts of Glory never left me angry, frustrated, or even stressed. Why is that?
The game radiates chillness. I suppose it helps that the starting character is basically The Dude from The Big Lebowski, with long hair, dark sunglasses, and a loose wardrobe that suggests nothing could spoil this California kickback, not even his shopping cart careening off a bluff. But what soothes my brain isn’t the look or even the twangy country-rock soundtrack (which you can get a taste of in the trailer below). It’s the feel of driving the shopping cart — the way the body cart floats atop its wheels.
Steering the cart down the hill is akin to controlling a hockey puck that’s been slapped toward the goal. The cart moves in the direction of its momentum. You have no gas or brakes, just an inclined plane. To steer, you aim the rider’s body in a new direction, and lunge to shift your trajectory.
For example: If you’re taking a gradual left curve, you can face leftward and nudge the cart so that it begins to curve its movement to the left. To brake, you can turn the cart around and shift away from the direction the vehicle is rolling, gradually countering its natural momentum down the hill.
In action, maneuvering a shopping cart down a hill feels similar to drifting, the momentum pulling in one direction as you push in another, with the most skilled drivers taking advantage of the tension to perfectly thread through traffic.
At first blush, elder millennials like myself might mistake Slackers – Carts of Glory as a Jackass-inspired novelty game, a funny gimmick with weak gameplay and zero depth. But despite the title, there’s nothing “slacker” about this game. Its creators, instead, did something I adore in art: They took a silly idea and took it seriously.
The game features multiple characters, a variety of hills with different looks and challenges, and one of the most joyful multiplayer modes in recent memory. There’s even a first-person mode that I strongly recommend you don’t use all the way through, but instead try once to experience the sheer, stomach-churning terror of zipping past a pickup truck at 90mph with nothing between you and certain doom but a thin metal cage.
Can you get to the grocery store before it closes? Yeah, sure. But who even needs the beer when riding a shopping cart is this much fun?