About A Game: Kurukuru Marumaru (PSX)
This game is my favorite obscure discovery from 2022. I don't remember seeing anyone play it or talk about it, but it's an absolute delight and I'd like more people to know about it.
Kurukuru Marumaru or くるくるまるまる (PSX, 2001), developed by Japan Art Media and published by Hudson, is a driving school simulator. It has a very cartoony style, and the story, presentation and especially the driving lessons can get rather silly.
While the driving itself isn't all that realistic, it does require you to follow many typical driving rules, much more than most driving games would. At the start of every lesson, you have to do a safety check by looking over your shoulder, have to use the turn signal, and then you're allowed to drive away. While driving you should obey the speed limit, stay in your lane, use turn signals, look into turns and crossings, and more to keep your instructor happy. Every lesson is scored in Travel Time, Traffic Rules and Driving Technique, and needs at least 70 of 100 points to pass.
The driving mechanics themselves also introduce quite a bit of challenge. The car's brakes aren't the best, and the steering wheel requires very careful turning. When you turn the wheel, it takes a while to turn it back to the center, and it's too easy to turn it too far and careen off the road. The first-person perspective out of the car also makes it hard to see and judge the location of anything to your sides.
The game moves much further away from any pretense at realism in the driving lessons themselves. In 15 lessons, your instructors give you tasks like balancing an egg on your dashboard or lifting the anchor of a sunken ship. One early lesson is a series of quiz questions, to be answered by taking the correct turn. In a later lesson, you have to play red light, green light with an actual tank, and it straight-up just shoots you if you move at the wrong time.
The characters and story and setting are similarly silly. There are several instructors with names like Mirror, Navi or Wiper, each with their own personality that shows during the lessons, and with their own sub-plots going on. The environments are nice and varied, with sunny seaside roads, gloomy caves, or jungles where Pokemon-like creatures hop across the road.
A big reason for why this game is not more known outside of Japan might be the language barrier, which is quite substantial. Some cutscenes between the lessons use dialogue boxes with only some short voice clips, which would still be manageable with a screen translation tool, but all of the pre-lesson briefings and all instructions and reactions during a lesson are purely voiced, without any subtitles. These instructions are sometimes vital, because the lessons can require some very specific actions. Without significant Japanese language skills, it would be hard to brute-force your way through the game.
Without any help, I was already stuck in the first lesson. Thankfully there is a Japanese playthrough of the game on Youtube by youtuber "tg", which I consulted a few times to figure out what to do, so a big thank you to them.
Now, when I encounter a game I really like and I want it to be more known and more accessible to people, I try to work on things to facilitate that, like for example this post, or a mobygames entry. In the case of this game, because of the language barrier, I put a bunch of effort into a full walkthrough which hopefully helps interested players in getting through the game.
I also luckily found a cheap copy of the game, which allowed me to scan the manual, with some lovely art and explanations for all lessons:
https://archive.org/details/kurukuru-marumaru-psx-manual/
The music in the game is generally fun and appropriate. For a few tracks, the devs have even collaborated with Japanese radio station J-WAVE to include music from then-contemporary alternative pop and rock artists from Japan. Both the game's intro logos and the manual specifically advertise the sampler CD J-WAVE DX presents SUPERNOVA. These songs are only featured in a few specific parts of the game, like the intro, the ending, and one specific lesson which plays one of three songs depending on the chosen route.
After finishing your 15 lessons and getting your driver's license, the game is not yet over. With a sudden surprising twist, the characters are rushing through a few more short stages, but this time without any scoring requirements. There are also two different ending scenes, one happier for the main character than the other, the choice of ending depending solely on your performance in lesson 14.
So this is Kurukuru Marumaru, my favorite discovery of 2022. After finishing my walkthrough, I did a stream of the full game on Twitch, also trying to translate the story as best I could: