The average racing game wants you to be the fastest and the most precise… but what if the plan is just to drive? You know: get out on the road and get lost. No speed records, no checkpoints, no achievements. The Slow Roads project by developer Anslo offers exactly that. You can choose the scenario, the season, and the time of day, enable self-driving, use cruise mode, and limit your speed.
I've thoroughly enjoyed (and suffered) with racing games in the past... but I belong to the Stunts generation. Sometimes I'd spend hours designing incredible tracks, only to take a couple of laps and start over from scratch. It was the search for a more personal, more intimate experience, if you will.
Today, racing games are inevitably noisy, chaotic, and online. The Forza Horizon games would be far more interesting if they stripped away all the baggage they carry, and the Need for Speed series still thinks it's 2001, three months after The Fast and the Furious hit theaters. If you want a game where you just go out and drive without goals or time limits, you might find it in Slow Roads.
Slow Roads: Drive and Nothing Else
Slow Roads is a project by developer Anslo, focused on design, architecture, and digital fabrication. On the surface, Slow Roads explores procedural generation of scenes and seeks to identify the limits of 3D applications in JavaScript. On a deeper level, it's a love letter to the fabulous roads of Peak District (search for images on Google and you'll know what I'm talking about), and to all the arcades Anslo played as a child.
What's most impressive is that everything works inside the browser, without downloading anything extra. Slow Roads lets us choose from three vehicles (roadster, motorcycle, and bus), two general environments (hills and off-world), one of four seasons, and the complexity of the road. We also have a timer to set the day/night cycle, camera controls, multiple keyboard shortcuts, and a self-driving mode with a speed limiter. Personally, this combination turns Slow Roads into an excellent wallpaper for any secondary monitor.
If your computer has some firepower, I recommend raising the details and distance to the maximum, with a render scale of 200 percent. Now, procedural generation isn't perfect (I've found the car clipping through the mountain a couple of times), but Anslo has done a great job.
Official site: Click here
