Look, I like to think I have a pretty open mind, particularly when we land on a discussion relating to “games as art”. I won’t go through the entire list, but I’ve played and enjoyed plenty of “games” that could only barely fit themselves into the definition of the word. Even so, by reputation alone, I probably would have skipped Wheels of Aurelia had I noticed it was from the same developers as another Enemy Slime favorite: Mirrormoon.
Wheels Of Aurelia is a self-described isometric racing game blended with a visual novel. You play as Lelle, a wild edgy woman driving up the western coast of Italy in a bid to find and confront a man who participated in her kidnapping years ago. Along your journey you’ll be accompanied by different passengers and hitchhikers with whom you can carry on conversations and who will all play into the ending that you’ll receive after your short journey. A typical playthrough takes somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes, but there are sixteen possible endings to be seen so the game is intended to be played multiple times in order to experience all the possible story options.
The game takes place in the late 70s and does a great job channeling the era. The passengers you pick up will often be talking about real events that happened around that time, the radio is blaring a really great retro soundtrack, and even the destinations on the map are laid out in a moderately accurate (albeit very small) fashion. When it comes to capturing the period Wheels of Aurelia does an admirable job, unfortunately it’s one of the game’s only strengths.
There’s not really much to the driving or occasional racing that you’ll find in the game. The space bar will serve as your gas pedal while the arrow keys will allow you to steer, it’s worth noting however that if you drive slow enough your car will simply steer itself. Bumping into other cars will cause them to honk at you, but you’re never in any danger and can’t actually crash or take damage in any way. Races do pop up occasionally, and for the most part they’re very trivial to win, even with the game’s slowest cars.
But of course racing isn’t the bread and butter here, instead our big focus is on story, particularly the stories of the different characters who you will encounter on your trip and how they effect Lelle’s journey. Your passenger at the beginning of every playthrough is Olga, a woman Lelle met the night before at a disco. As you travel with Olga you’ll find that she’s pregnant and hitching a ride with you to France so that she can get an abortion. You can converse with Olga using the up and down arrow keys as you drive. It’s interesting (and somewhat weird) to talk to this stranger about the finer points of abortion but the issue is that Olga is always your first passenger and so you’ll be having these same conversations every single time you restart the game. While some of the conversation is randomized you’ll have still experienced almost all of it by the third or fourth playthrough.
On my first playthrough I followed the most obvious path and ended up with an ending where Olga and I decided to keep her baby and raise it together as strong single women who don’t need no man, which is a totally normal thing to do after spending a single car ride with someone you just met. At this point I was still trying to figure out what precisely decided how the plot moved forward, so for my second run I followed the exact same path while choosing completely different dialogue options. Alas I quickly found that this lead to the exact same ending. It seems like dialogue while driving doesn’t have nearly as much of an effect on the game’s story as the actual destinations you drive to.
That initial ending out of left field is the first of many times that Wheels of Aurelia goes to strange and completely unearned narrative destinations. One of the passengers you can find is a priest who will tell you about going to visit his sick mother, but by asking the right questions you can get an ending in which the two of you go to rescue the recently kidnapped President instead. Because the game almost never lasts more than ten minutes these types of endings come completely out of left field. One minute Lelle was off to confront a former kidnapper, but the slightest breeze can cause her and her pregnant friend to start tracking down fascist terrorists instead.
I’m perfectly fine with a game that’s light on actual gameplay, but I am bothered by a game that doesn’t actually account for the player’s presence. There are certain scenarios in Wheels of Aurelia that will occur regardless of your decisions, and they go a long way in taking you out of the carefully crafted settings. Here’s an example, early on you can replace Olga with a new passenger, a racing veteran turned ex-con named Gorilla. It doesn’t take long to realize that Gorilla’s hope is that you’ll serve as his getaway driver, he will constantly ask you to stop at different banks, a request that you can easily deduce will lead to a robbery. I picked up on this early on and decided not to make any stops despite Gorilla’s pleas. It made no difference because when we reached a major town Gorilla suggested we hotwire a car to which Lelle proclaims she’s in enough trouble already after that bank they robbed earlier. Only they didn’t rob a bank, I made sure of it.
I don’t say this very often but a little more randomization could really have improved this game. As you play you can unlock different cars to start the game with and I would have liked to see starting with a different car causing you to also start with a different passenger, that probably would have gone a long way to soothing the nearly unbearable repetition. As it stands now, Wheels of Aurelia is a somewhat interesting experiment and while I appreciate the obvious research and work that went into recreating a 70s era Italy, I also never really had much fun playing it, a problem that just got worse with every subsequent playthrough. Fans of Santa Ragione’s back catalog will likely find something to enjoy here, there’s certainly more to this than Mirrormoon, but I can’t recommend this one in good conscience, even as a “work of art”.
