Former Skyrim dev announces a vehicular free-running game where you launch a car through a claymation world using mouth-sound explosions, and that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever had to fit into a headline

I had not realised that carkour—the theoretical act of performing parkour with a car—was something I wanted to exist until approximately 40 minutes ago, and now it has somersaulted to the summit of my own hierarchy of needs. Stuff all that nonsense about esteem and self-actualisation. I want to do backflips in a hot-rod.

You could argue that carkour tacitly exists in games like Rocket League and Trackmania already. But they did not give it a clever name, and that ultimately is all that matters. This is the little nugget of genius upon which Deedlee Doo! Carkour—a newly announced game dedicated to vehicular free-running—hopes to build its fortune.

Deedlee Doo! Carkour! is the latest harebrained scheme from ex-Bethesda designer Nate Purkeypile, a veteran of games like Skyrim, all the Bethesda Fallouts, and Starfield. Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 to form his own indie studio, recently releasing the “heavy metal horror game” The Axis Unseen.

Deedlee Doo is a different beast from The Axis Unseen tonally, mechanically, and well, everything-ly, tasking players with navigating a dinosaur-shaped racecar through a surrealist obstacle course. The key mechanical hook here is that your jet-propelled car can backfire like a medium-sized bomb going off, and you can use the resulting explosion to propel your vehicle through the air. You can then fine-tune your airborne movement using said engine, enabling you to steer as you fly and drive along walls.

It’s a wonderfully silly concept, and remarkably, driving an exploding car is the least weird thing about it. Deedlee Doo’s world is built entirely from scans of clay models sculpted in real life, while the game’s audio is comprised entirely of mouth sounds. Also, as the game’s Steam page notes “If you screw up a jump, children laugh and make fun of you,” which is how all failure states in games should work, frankly.

Given the time passed since the Axis Unseen’s Launch, this seems like a rapid-fire project. Yet as games like Content Warning have proved, making games quick and dirty can sometimes yield a massive hit. There isn’t long to wait until Deedlee Doo launches either. It rocket jumps onto Steam on May 12, whereupon it will cost “less than a cup of coffee.”