My Summer Car is one of those games that I'd never personally heard of but was still wildly popular thanks to the niche it caters to anyway.
What niche? Well, it's as the name says. It's all about you and your car(s). "My Summer Car is the ultimate car owning, building, fixing, tuning, maintenance and permadeath life survival simulator," the game's Steam blurb says. "You start the game with hundreds of loose parts and assemble both car and engine.
Not only you need to maintain your car, but yourself as well. Sausages, beer and sleeping will do just fine... Not only you have access to one car, but also several other cars and vehicles which you can use." The loop sees you spending hours in first-person on the tiny little details that go into a fixer-upper, only to have whatever car you've built derail into a tree within its first five minutes on the road, at which point you'll need to trek on foot to the nearest shop to grab some beef jerky with the only cash you have left.
A real Finnish summer, then. My Summer Car's mix of super intricate car simulation and wacky life sim stuff already made it a hit when it entered early access in 2016, but after eight years of updates, the game's courted over 77,000 user reviews and a whopping 94% of them are positive. "Really silly car game and the dev actually acknowledges the reality of how painful it is to do anything," one player writes. "Took nine hours, finally got engine to run.
It blew up 5 min later and I got ran over by a bus," another says. (Both left positive ratings, by the way. See what else is coming out this year with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.