Parking Garage Rally Circuit is a tightly-designed shot of drifting, PS1-era graphics, and ska music straight to the veins

I didn't have my expectations set too highly for Parking Garage Rally Circuit going in. I like the PS1 (or, as the Steam page invokes, Sega Saturn) style of graphics a lot. I find them charming, nostalgic, and pleasing to the eye. But it's also very fashionable at the moment, which means there's no guarantee that a game using them is going to be interesting.

I'm pleased to report that Parking Garage Rally Circuit (which I'm gonna start calling PGRC for my own sanity) is, however, really quite good. It's a very stripped-down racing experience: there's eight tracks, each of which you can go through three times via the three weight classes of car you can unlock. You have an accelerate button, a brake button, and a drift button. That's the game.

The meat, which I was starting to feel even after just an hour of blasting through it, comes in how you use those tools. You nudge left or right and push your drift button to start drifting. Then, you can choose between one of three options—turn inwards for a sharper turn, turn outwards for a larger turn, or let ska take the wheel (the game has a ska soundtrack) and don't turn either way. There's a little bit of leeway, so you can adjust mid-drift if you'd like.

PGRC then dangles a carrot on a stick in front of you—see, if you keep a drift going for long enough, you gain a speed boost. A little longer, and you'll get a bigger jump to your MPH. Chain these powered-up drifts together, and you start flying. Sometimes literally, as your car starts dangerously yeeting itself off every slope like it's a ramp.

Except, drifting also magnetises you to the ground, so with a little bit of clever tire-burning you can ride the lightning by starting a drift before your tires leave the concrete. If I play your game for less than an hour and I already discover hidden tech, I generally take that as a good sign—and it helps that PGRC controls very well. Everything felt responsive and snappy, and any time I lost control of my vehicle, it was