MY SUMMER CAR: COMPLETE BEGINNER'S GUIDE

The first time I played My Summer Car I died in about forty minutes. I'd walked to the store, bought groceries I couldn't afford, walked home, gotten drunk on the porch because I was stressed about the groceries, fallen asleep in the grass, and woken up dead from exposure because it turns out Finnish nights in this game are cold and being passed out in the yard is a survivable situation exactly zero percent of the time. The game showed me the death screen. It felt like the game was laughing at me.

My Summer Car is the most hostile teacher I've ever had in a video game. It tells you almost nothing. It gives you a car that's been disassembled into approximately three hundred individual parts scattered across your garage floor, a character with four body meters that all want to kill him, a Finnish countryside full of ways to die, and it says good luck. There's no tutorial. There's no quest marker. There's no hint system. If you ask the internet how to do something, the community's standard response is "figure it out." This game's entire design philosophy is that the learning curve is the content. Getting frustrated is the game. Dying is the game. And I love it, genuinely, despite everything.

So here's the thing. I'm not going to pretend I can teach you to master My Summer Car in one blog post. Nobody can. What I can do is stop you from making the dumbest mistakes that kill new players in their first week, so you actually get to the good part where the car runs and you can start having fun. Let's go.

What is actually happening when you start a new game

You wake up as a nameless Finnish guy in a rural cottage in the summer of 1995. Your parents are away on vacation and they've given you a project. There's a car in your garage. It's called the Satsuma, and it is extremely loosely based on a real Datsun 100A. The Satsuma is in roughly three hundred pieces. Your job, over the course of the summer, is to put it back together, get it inspected, get plates, and make it drive. That's the whole game.

Except it isn't, because while you're doing that you also have to eat, drink, sleep, and pee. You have to earn money to buy parts. You have to drive to the store, which means you need something to drive, which is a problem because your main car is in pieces. You have a moped and a tractor. Use them. You also have a broken-down rally car called the Ruscko that runs badly but runs, if you can get it started. And there's a van your dad left you that also kinda works.

The countryside is dangerous. There are drunk drivers on the road. There's a logging truck driver named Suski who will occasionally run you over. There are moose and elk that will total your car if you hit them at speed. The police will stop you if you don't have plates or if you're drunk. The tax man comes in the mail and if you ignore him long enough, the game ends. This is not a relaxing summer.

The basic needs that will kill you first

Your character has a bunch of body meters. The ones that will kill you in week one are hunger, thirst, and tiredness. There's also a bladder meter that won't kill you but will make your character pee his pants, which ruins your stress level, which has its own consequences.

Hunger. Buy bread, macaroni, sausages, and pickles at the store. Eat them from your fridge or your inventory. If you run out of food you die. Sounds obvious. New players forget about it because they're busy fiddling with the Satsuma for six hours of real time.

Thirst. Drink water. There's a tap in your cottage. You can also drink from lakes, which sometimes works and sometimes gives you stomach issues. Beer counts as a drink but also gets you drunk. Milk at the store. Coffee if you're feeling fancy. Keep a glass of water near you at all times.

Sleep. Your bed is in the cottage. Sleep at night. If you don't sleep, your character will eventually fall asleep on his own, and if that happens while you're driving, you will crash. I've done this three times. Once into a tree, once into a ditch, and once into a lake. Sleep when you're tired. The meter isn't subtle. If you're yawning, go home.

Bladder. Find a tree. Press the button. Relief.

The Satsuma is a puzzle with three hundred pieces

Here's where the game's reputation comes from. The Satsuma is genuinely disassembled down to the bolt. You have to install every single part, in the correct order, with the correct fastener, tightened to the correct torque, or it won't work. And the game doesn't tell you what order to do it in. Or what tool to use. Or what the torque spec is.

The correct order, roughly, is this. Engine block goes on the subframe. Crankshaft, pistons, connecting rods, cylinder head, camshaft, timing chain, valve cover. Water pump, alternator, starter motor. Intake manifold, carburetor, exhaust manifold, exhaust. Oil pan, oil filter. Flywheel, clutch, gearbox. Then you drop the whole assembly into the engine bay and connect it to the driveshaft. That's just the engine. Then you have suspension, brakes, wheels, steering, interior, body panels, lights, battery, fluids. Every bolt. Every single bolt.

What makes this bearable is that the game has a book in your cottage called the Haynes Manual, which is actually inside the game. It tells you the assembly order and the torque specs for every component. Read it. Actually read it. New players skip the manual and then spend six hours trying to figure out why the car won't start, and the answer is always that they forgot to install a tiny part or tighten a bolt properly.

Tighten bolts with a spanner or a ratchet, not your hands. Hand-tight is not enough. Under-torqued bolts will fall off while you drive. Over-torqued bolts will strip the threads and the part won't hold. The game simulates this. Get a torque wrench as soon as you can afford one. It's a night-and-day quality of life upgrade.

I put together a breakdown of the most realistic car games that gets into why My Summer Car sits at the absolute peak of the genre for mechanical simulation. Nothing else even comes close to this level of part-by-part granularity. You can argue it's too much. You can't argue it isn't realistic.

Ways to die that aren't obvious

Here's a list of things that have killed my characters, presented as a warning.

Falling asleep at the wheel. The fatigue meter will force your eyes shut. If you're driving, you will crash. Don't drive tired.

Drinking and driving. The police patrol the roads. They run breathalyzers. If you blow over the limit you get fined, your license gets taken, or you die in a crash first. The penalty for repeat DUIs is severe. Don't do it.

Hitting the elk. There's a specific stretch of road where an elk will walk out in front of you. The elk doesn't care about your bumper. At any speed above about thirty, hitting it will total the Satsuma and often kill you. Slow down on forest roads. Especially at dawn and dusk.

Driving without plates. The Satsuma needs an inspection and plates before you can legally drive it. If you drive without plates the police will chase you, pull you over, and fine you hard. If you're in a particularly low-stress playthrough and you just want to drive around, you will lose all your money to fines within the first hour. Get the inspection first.

Wasp stings. There's a wasp nest in the woods near the cottage. If you bump it, wasps attack you, and if you're already low on health you die. The game doesn't warn you. It just swarms you.

The septic tank truck. There's a job where you drive a septic tank truck for the neighbor. If you don't seal the valve properly before driving, the contents spill into the truck cab, which is the funniest and grossest thing in the game. You won't die but you will wish you had.

Drowning. Falling asleep in the sauna. Getting hit by Suski the logging truck driver, who is always drunk and always going too fast. The list is long.

How to make money without dying

You need money to buy car parts. Your starting funds are not enough. The game has several odd jobs that let you earn income.

Firewood. There's a pile of logs behind your cottage. You chop them with an axe, load them into the tractor trailer, drive them to a guy named Uncle who pays by the piece. It's slow but steady and it's the first job you should do. The axe also works as a murder weapon if the wrong hitchhiker shows up.

Haybales. There's a field where you can bale hay with the tractor and sell the bales to a farmer. Pays decently. Takes patience.

The septic tank truck. Your neighbor pays you to drive his septic tank truck to various houses, empty their tanks, and dump the waste at the treatment plant. Pays well. Smells worse.

Pizza delivery. There's a pizza place in the nearest town that will hire you to deliver pizzas. The pay is okay but the real value is that you get to drive around a lot, which exposes you to other ways to die.

Rally driving. Later in the game, once the Satsuma is running, you can enter rally events for prize money. This is where the car payoff lives. You built a rally car, now you drive it in a rally, and if it holds together you win cash.

Stealing is an option if you want to be that guy. There are houses with stuff you can take. There are also consequences. I don't recommend it.

The kalja brewer is a goldmine

In your basement there's a barrel that brews kalja, a Finnish homebrew beer. You load it with ingredients. Sugar, yeast, water, hops if you're fancy. You wait. Kalja comes out. You drink it or sell it.

Selling kalja to Jokke, the local drunk, is one of the best money sources in the game. He's always near his house near the lake. He pays well per bottle. A full barrel cycle, brewed correctly, nets you more than a day of firewood chopping for a fraction of the effort.

The kalja does go bad. Don't let it sit too long. Also don't drink too much of your own supply, because you will end up passed out in the yard and we've already covered how that ends.

Things new players mess up constantly

Buying parts before you have the tools to install them. You need a ratchet set, sockets, a spanner, and eventually a torque wrench. These are all available at the hardware store in Teimo's town. Get them first.

Forgetting to install the battery. The car will not start without a battery. The battery needs to be charged. There's a charger. Use it.

Forgetting engine oil. The engine will seize within minutes of running dry. Check the dipstick. Add oil.

Running out of fuel. The Satsuma has a small tank. Keep a jerry can in the trunk. The gas station is in town and it costs real game money.

Driving the Ruscko into the ground before the Satsuma is done. The Ruscko is your backup car. It's already beaten up. If you destroy it in week one you have no working vehicle except the moped and the tractor and the van, which is fine but slow. Don't rally the Ruscko on the dirt roads for fun. Drive it like a grandma until the Satsuma takes over.

Not saving. The game saves when you sleep. If you don't sleep, you don't save. If you die, you lose everything since the last save. Sleep often. Even if you're not tired, get into the bed, close your eyes, save the game.

Ignoring the mailbox. The tax man sends you bills. If you don't pay them, bad things happen. Check your mail. Pay your bills.

The learning curve is the point

Here's the honest pitch for why My Summer Car is worth suffering through. Most car games, even the good ones, give you the car as a given. You turn the key, the engine runs. You drive, the tires grip. The machine is an abstraction that the game handles for you. My Summer Car takes every one of those abstractions and turns it into a problem you have to solve. Why won't it start? Because you didn't install the distributor cap. Why is it overheating? Because you forgot coolant. Why does it pull to the left? Because your tire pressures are uneven.

By the time you get the Satsuma running, you've learned more about how a car actually works than most drivers will learn in their lives. You know what a carburetor does because you had to install one and tune it. You know what compression does because you had to set the valve clearances and measure them. That knowledge is real. It carries over to real cars. I've used stuff I learned in this game to fix my actual car in my actual driveway. That's wild.

If you want games with some of this spirit but without the brutality, I put together a list of games like My Summer Car that cover a range of difficulty levels. You can also look at car builder simulator games for the assembly fantasy without the starvation mechanics, or read about whether Car Mechanic Simulator actually teaches you anything about real mechanics. All of these are more forgiving than My Summer Car. All of them are also less rewarding when you finally hear your engine turn over.

My Summer Car is not for everyone. It's not even for most people. It's for the specific kind of player who reads a parts catalog for fun, who likes simulations that don't flinch, who wants a game that will absolutely kick their teeth in before it lets them succeed. If you are that person, you already know you are. Go buy it. Get yelled at by Finnish developer Johannes Rojola's design decisions for sixty hours. Have the best time of your summer.

Just remember. Don't drink and drive. Don't fall asleep outside. Watch for the elk. Install the battery. And save, always save, before you do anything stupid.