(Image credit: Future)
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
To my right, a short, barrel-chested man in sunglasses and a cowboy hat staring back at me. They spark up a cigarette. I spark up a cigarette. Another man in sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing besides us sparks a cigarette. The man behind tells me to “punch it” and we begin our descent down a huge wonky wooden ramp, accelerating in our RV toward a plunge into a gorge and near-certain death.
We make it. As does the RV. Just. It no longer has doors, bumpers, hood, roof, ladder, windows, and the wheels are falling off. We collectively toke on our cigarettes, toss ’em, then spark up some fresh cigs.
This is RV There Yet? A game that’s determined to drive me up the wall, figuratively, for including a question mark in the name, and literally, because it’s a game about driving a recreational vehicle over big rocks.
It’s the sorta game that’s designed to be played with friends. A genre often affectionately called ‘friend slop’, it asks very little of players—costing only $7/£6 and with a control scheme that boils down to look at thing, pick up thing, throw thing. There are some interesting driving mechanics—you need to grasp the concept of a stick shift to get around but you don’t have to worry about the clutch—and there are three whole keys dedicated to lighting, smoking, and extinguishing a cigarette. My kinda game.
There’s not much in the way of story. At one point I had a feeling it was trying to teach me something about the dangers of throwing cigarette butts with abandon in national parks, but then I saw a really big ramp and the thought escaped me.
RV There Yet? is what you make of it. You’re free to use your imagination as a team to get around its various puzzles. Most of which involve large rocks that you need to get over You can raise the RV up using ramps, planks, or pneumatic lifters, or just floor it and hope for the best. It leads to plenty of clips—perhaps not as many as Peak, or Lethal Company, or Repo, but it has the same appeal.
I played with the same cohort of pals I tend to play these sorts of games with and we’ve smashed through a bunch of it in a week. We’ve traversed hilltops, mountains, and mines on our way to… I’ve just realised I don’t even know where we’re going. I have no concept of where ‘there’ is and whether we’ll ever reach it. But that hardly matters. Along the way, we’ve come ever-so-close to destroying the RV, been bitten by snakes, carried by birds, and tried some preposterous hacks with winches to circumvent puzzles.
It’s very likely in another week or two, we’ll move on and never play the game again. Of course, I’ll keep it installed for roughly three to five years in case we decide to play again, which we might, but it’s also likely we won’t. And that’s totally fine. I’ve got my money’s worth and then some.
That’s what I appreciate RV There Yet? and games like it. Get in, have a blast, get out. In five years’ time you go through some folder named ‘game recordings’ and rediscover clips of you and your pals powering an RV off the side of a bridge with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Fortunate Son’ playing in the background. I still look fondly on the clips of my friends and I playing Lethal Company, Repo, Nuclear Nightmare, Bigfoot, Peak, and Content Warning. It doesn’t really matter that I spent less time in all of these games combined than The Finals just this year alone.
I’ve got my hooks into a lot of great games this year: Battlefield 6, Arc Raiders, Dispatch, and Peak among them. All deserving of awards and being appropriately showered with them, including our own GOTY picks. But it feels right to give a nod to RV There Yet? I’ve had a great time with it, and it’s perfect for unwinding with some pals when you’ve played a few too many bad rounds of Arc Raiders.
