I’ve never felt worse for doing well in a videogame than in this intensely ’90s citybuilder

I think it’s obvious and uncontroversial to say that the automobile is a tool of capital to subjugate the worker, to atomise them in their locomoting coffins and alienate them from their fellow human beings. It is bourgeois ideology made manifest: an expensive fantasy that you are separate from, free of, and superior to society.

I’m not just saying this because I’m 33 years old and have no driving licence. That’s actually very radical and, dare I say it, sexy of me.

I am considering these weighty matters because of Car Park Capital, a recently early-accessed management sim and citybuilder that tasks you with putting an end to those familiar old plagues which never rest from menacing society: walkability, green spaces, and public transport. You are the lone force standing against urban comfort and livability, and your weapon is an ocean of asphalt.

It’s satire, yes, right down to the little anthropomorphic steering wheel who lives in the corner of your screen and implores you to flatten, pave, and homogenise the Earth. But it’s also bloody good—an almost perfect aesthetic recreation of hallowed sims of yore: games like Theme Park, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and the like. It’s transportive—which I suppose is appropriate—moving you back to the blocky polygonal worlds and sprite-based punters of a simpler, more ’90s era.

But it does not rest on its laurels. It’s rather fun to dirty your hands in the business of buying up swathes of useful public land—filled with dense housing, public transport infrastructure, and other assorted vectors of communism—and bulldoze the hell out of it. Get that stuff outta here! We’ve got baking black blocks to array in neat, featureless rows.

In your remit as god-king sans portfolio, you’re also responsible for things like crime and punishment and the construction of a suburban sprawl. This is great news. As you annihilate downtown apartment blocks (literally buying up their land, evicting their tenants, and bulldozing the buildings) the rubes you’ve kicked out need somewhere else to go. You have just the place: utterly unsustainable suburbs with zero transport links, where cars are as vital as air.

It’s the perfect scam: as you convert more of the world into car parks, the demand for car parks increases, and anyone you can’t more-or-less deport into car-dependence you can target with literal propaganda—billboards, loudspeaker-equipped vans, that kind of thing. In the event of public objection to your onslaught (which can happen—populations are prone to get restive as you hollow out their infrastructure right under them), simply deploy your own cops. It’s the American dream come to life in a very good game you will feel very bad for succeeding at.