Synth music! Eighties stuff! Retro pixels! Racing! It’s fair to say PalmRide (which costs a measly £2 on Steam) has it all in one neat little package.

It’s styled like one of those ’80s DOS racers like Out Run (1986), but with a few new retrofuturistic twists and a pelting Eighties soundtrack to complement proceedings. Big hair!

PalmRide, Synth, Keyboards (and cars)

The game is from three-man indie team Pixelbois. One, Silvius Hader, explains the concept behind the game:

“I am a Computer Science student at the University of Bucharest and we had to make a personal project for a course. We got to choose what the project we’re working on is, so I decided to make a pseudo3D racing game (like Outrun), so I followed [advice] about pseudo3D road rendering …

After the project was pretty much finished (and I was about to get a good grade for this project), I asked reddit if I should turn this into a full game, and I was surprised to see that people really reacted to that post and they wanted this to be a full game.”

The original game is included in PalmRide to dig along one.

But the proper full version is easy to get into. You begin the game and just floor it. Simples. It gives you some basic instructions and that’s to:

• Floor it.
• Travel as far as possible along the highways.
• Avoid collisions with traffic.
• Collect power-ups to assist your progress.
• Cruise along chilling to synth music.

That’s it really! There’s not too much enormity to the game’s length (it’s only £2 after all), but you do get multiple stages. The city, driving up a mountain, a beach etc. Here’s one of them in action.

Along with Out Run, other ’80s classics like Rad Racer (1987) are the inspiration here. And it’s a fitting tribute of sorts. Homage more like.

And a lot of fun it is, too! We like it.

There’s a surprising amount of complexity jammed into it. A bit like the awesome Minit Fun Racer, which we covered recently. It’s all deceptively simple, but you do need to have some skill to do well in this game.

Speed. Avoid traffic. Get power-ups. Cruise and disco jive.

We mean, that ruddy epic pelting synth soundtrack is there to headbang to whenever you need it. Here’s Shinjitsu highway, dammit! Go Eighties!

However, there’s even an option to add your own music into the game! Want to cruise along listening to Cher Lloyd’s smash hit Swagger Jagger? Now’s your chance!

So, yeah, PalmRide is all cut back and minmalistic.

But for what it is you’re getting a lot here. There are frustrations along the way Namely if you hit anything, you have to start over—it’s pretty trick going.

You can be hurtling along and then a series of minor blunders ruin your progress. And you have to start all over again. Hurray? No.

But we’ll give it some leeway here as it’s so cheap. And what you get crammed into the package is really bang for your buck.