Turn Right by Dee Cooke
The game explains British traffic rules; and there’s a map; and I’ve actually driven a car from Dover to Exeter and back, and into Dartmoor as well, and that’s not even counting the many hours I spent on a bike in and around Cambridge when I was a visiting PhD student there; and still I kept having driving-on-the-right-side-of-the-road thoughts. ‘But why don’t I first go to the roundabout and then get to the other side of the road that way?’ Oh no, wait.
Turn Right is a urban horror story – okay, not really – about having to cross a road and turn right while the traffic is atrocious. The local traffic planning also seems to be atrocious, because nobody should be required to cross a four-lane road that way in order to get to their destination! But we have to, and adding to the horror is the fact that our driver is extremely self-conscious and afraid of inserting themselves forcefully into the traffic. Especially when the traffic was standing still because of the traffic lights, it seemed to me that they could have taken a more pro-active stance to get through. But there were times when I myself was also a very hesitant driver, so I’m not here to blame them.
To be honest, the game didn’t really click for me. You just type ‘turn right’ over and over, and over, and over, and the game keeps throwing problems at you. But you don’t have to solve them. You just keep typing ‘turn right’. That’s mildly funny, but after a while I kind of stopped reading with full attention because, well, I knew I just had to repeat the command ‘turn right’. Maybe I completely missed the real game. Maybe I should have tried other commands. But I just repeated ‘turn right’, and in the end, it worked.
So maybe the point is that mindless patience will be rewarded? Or that it won’t?