Cube Racer: the racing game its own fans keep describing as something else

Every round lets you build the trap the next player has to get through — and, going on what players report, the thing does not always even get as far as launching.

Every round is the workshop for the next trap

Winning a race in Cube Racer buys you exactly one round. In the break, everyone at the table — including whoever just lost — can raise a new obstacle anywhere on the track, and in the round that follows that obstacle stops being a choice: whoever built it has to get through it too. The track does not reset; it piles up. What started as an empty straight ends up, round after round, as a run of traps that nobody there designed alone — you included, if you pull up a chair.

Away from the group races, there is a mode for players on their own: a campaign with fixed maps and fixed obstacles, built around beating your own time rather than beating anyone else. Everything you play — against other people or against the clock — pays out credits, and it is those credits that unlock new kinds of obstacle and let you make them bigger or nastier. Nothing arrives ready-made, though: the first halfway decent obstacle turns up only after a string of plain races. Players who would rather lay out a track themselves get a map editor, and anyone wanting to gather friends away from Steam can stand up a dedicated server, reserved for that group alone.

The store page lists 300 different obstacles to unlock across 25 standard maps — plus whatever the community itself publishes via the editor. The game runs on Windows and on Linux, with partial controller support.

One name signs off as both studio and publisher

Simon Blasen shows up twice on Cube Racer's store listing: once as the studio, once as the publisher. The same person on both sides, which explains the long silences as much as the returns. In 2018 that developer made a call that was neither a sale nor a clearance: he took the price off the game permanently. His own explanation on the community hub is blunt — the project had grown out of spare time, with no pressure to turn a profit, and the priority was having enough people at the table for the part that actually mattered: racing others and sabotaging them in real time. A multiplayer game without players is not a game. You are part of that arithmetic.

The launch of that new model, in July 2018, came bundled with a round of content: extra obstacles, a campaign to play solo and a knockout mode. A slightly earlier update had already settled something else: the cube's cosmetic extras — costumes and horns — are earned in play alone, drawn from packs that cost nothing but time on the track; in-game purchases never existed at all.

The game then went quiet for a while. On 5 April 2020 came an update titled simply as a comeback: new background, new font, new menu — the sort of touch-up a project does when it starts breathing again after months behind a closed door. On 9 November of that same year, Blasen announced Cube Racer 2: more maps and more content than the first, obstacles that evolve — lethal ones, moving ones, ones that give you a boost — and a new way of scoring points, in which being the fastest cube stops being the only thing that counts.

Reviews that run away from the game they are about

Players recommending Cube Racer on Steam mostly do not write about Cube Racer. A three-hour review posted on 5 April 2021 congratulates the studio for having put, in the words of its author, an entire fighting game with anime characters in there. Another, at 23 hours, swears every crewman on a famous pirate ship understands why this game exists at the bottom of the sea. A third, at 14 hours, presents itself as a write-up of a far more famous zombie game. The joke repeats review after review: pretend the cube is something else, anything else, as long as it is not itself — and you start laughing along.

The joke changes key the moment somebody turns serious. One player sums up the game's strength in a few lines — rounding up the gang for daft races — after a single hour, in March 2022. Two Russian-language reviews tell a different story. One, at 26 hours, agrees that the little cube racer is good fun, yet admits to preferring other games. The other racks up 29 hours and recommends it all the same — while reporting that the copy freezes and never gets as far as opening. Recommending a game that does not always open is the most honest contradiction this set of reviews produces.

For players with people to call on — and only for them

A trap somebody plants in one round only earns its laugh if there is someone on the other side of the screen for you to blame. That is where Cube Racer works: a full table, friends arguing over who raised the dirtiest obstacle, a server of your own standing for the whole crew. Keep company and the track never stops growing. On your own, what is left is the campaign and the map editor — honest ways to pass the time, but ones that never touch the reason the studio itself gave for the game existing: people playing with people.

Anyone about to install it should keep in mind what one of the most-played reviews recorded: 29 hours of use and, even so, the complaint that the game freezes and will not open again. Take that risk with company, and the track grows with you. Stay solo, or short on patience for a technical fault the record does not explain, and the reason to skip it is already clear.