My Summer Car review: A sordid sim of piss and pistons that won’t hold your disgusting little hand

Masochism and the art of motorcar maintenance

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / AmisTech Games

• Developer: AmisTech Games
• Publisher: AmisTech Games
• Release: Jan 8th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £11/$15/€15
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

I can’t get out. I’m trapped in a tractor full of beer and spare tires. I haven’t taken a shower in days and a fly has gotten into the cab, buzzing around my ears, anticipating the feast that will come from my sweaty summer death. I just spent nearly an hour driving this tractor to the shop, buying car parts, and rumbling back in the dark. I took my eyes off the road for two seconds to turn on the headlights. It was a mistake. The road curved sharply and I went off a steep bank, tipping my tractor on its side. The door is stuck, the tractor’s wheels spin helplessly. There is no recovering from this. I restart the game for the third or fourth time, not knowing whether to laugh or sob.

My Summer Car is as hardcore as they come. It does not simply throw you in at the deep end. It ties you up in a cloth sack with 50 kg of lug nuts and dumps you in the Baltic sea. “Sink or swim!” yells this game at you, but in Finnish, so even that you cannot understand. To a certain kind of person, this is an act of love.

Even before you wake up in your rural house, you will sense the tone of the game. Upon startup, you choose from a variety of graphics settings, including “shitty”, “better”, “good” and “Golden Eye”. The main menu plays looping music that belongs on a Geocities website in 2003. You can click on a smiley face to turn this music off, and the smiley face will become a sad face. My Summer Car is not interested in being a “good” game. It wants to answer a profound question: how many gags can a car mechanic sim squeeze in before it even begins? How many people can I alienate before they even give me a chance?

Once you’re in, you encounter a recognisable life sim. You play a young man who wakes up in his bedroom in rural Suomi, Finland in 1995. Your parents have gone on holiday, leaving you only one instruction: fix the busted car in the driveway. Get this vehicle in good working order and it may even pass an inspection by local authorities. A wholesome summer project.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / AmisTech Games

In any other game, this might manifest as a Stardew Valley style marathon of cosy odd jobs, with plenty of bright and breezy characters to meet. But here, you are offered an instructionless hardcore survival game in which you must juggle meters such as “stress”, “fatigue”, “hunger”, and “urine”, all while trying (often failing) to get to the local store before it closes for the day. The countryside is vast and often featureless. The people who populate it are full of contempt.

But to explore that countryside you need wheels. You find your uncle’s tractor hiding in a shed, and there’s a moped leaning against the wall of the house too. Learning to drive these is itself a challenge. Like the rest of the game there’s no tutorial. You are at the mercy of a cluttered controls screen and may gamely try to intuit which lever to pull and how to turn on the ignition. But operating the game’s many switches, buttons, and knobs, is a finicky lesson in pure patience. This is what happened when I first tried to drive the tractor without help.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / AmisTech Games

Left click operates some buttons and levers, while right click will pull them back. Sometimes you need to use the scroll wheel to rotate a knob. You will often have to lean to either side just to reach the parking brake. The throttle is operated by clicking on the lever, but gears are changed with hotkeys. If racing games simplify driving to create speed and fun, My Summer Car recomplicates the act out of snickering schadenfreude. Throw all your intuition into a bin when you arrive in Finland, my friend. You must learn to video game all over again.

You must also learn the entire inner workings of a passenger car. The broken vehicle in your driveway is the rusty chassis of a car called the “Satsuma”. Almost all the parts you need are arranged in shelves and scattered on the floor of your garage. A fully disassembled combustion engine lies in bits and must be painfully reconstructed. The steering column needs to be put back in. The suspension, brakes, gearbox, wheels - everything, every little bolt - has to be accounted for.

Some of these parts you’ll need to order via mail. In another game this might simply be a menu. You’d click the part and - bloop - it would show up on your shelf. Here, ordering, say, a fuel mixture gauge means using a magazine in the garage to make an envelope appear, driving 20 minutes to the store, putting the envelope in the post box, driving back home, waiting two in-game days, getting a phone call from the store owner who says your package has arrived, driving back to the store to pick it up, then coming home again. It is comically laborious.

Even when you have all the parts, you will not necessarily know what to do with them. I have spent almost as much time watching YouTube tutorials for My Summer Car as I have actually playing it. If you’re anything like me, you will hunt down a guide to drive the tractor . You will seek out a proper map of the local area . And you may or may not enjoy making sense of this diagram explaining how to build the car’s engine. For a man who only got his driving license in his mid-thirties, just reading the names of these components brings to mind the piping jargon scene of Patriot . I relied heavily on the thorough guidance of the game’s wiki . And I still came away from my time in Finland an abject, grinning failure.

For many, there’s something admirable about games that care this little about you. The reason such games persist is that their “figure it out” attitude is atomically bonded with the act of discovery and the sense of reward that this brings. In Rain World , you struggle through endless deaths to discover strange and wonderful creatures. In Pathologic 2 , you fight an interminable hunger to discover haunting children by railway tracks . In My Summer Car you will discover that pissing straight up into the sky lets you drink your own urine. It lowers your thirst bar.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / AmisTech Games

This is part of its stubbornly juvenile schtick. There is a swearing button, a button to flip people the bird, a button to light and smoke a cigarette (it lowers your stress). The sauna, where you can also lower your stress meter, has a gauge with a little naked man on it, and the temperature needle stands in for his steadily rising boner. Meanwhile, the people you meet are heinous, demanding, and sweary. Many are almost as hostile to your existence as the game is itself. One drunk man will call you in the middle of the night to demand a ride, like you are a taxi. A large number of characters in the game, from old ladies to policemen, have the same haunting and hideous face.

It would be easy for an impatient player to write the game off as childish jank. But the immaturity is just an accent to the strength and variety of its simulation. Every sim is defined by what mundane actions it considers important enough to simulate. In this, there is a frightening array of possibilities. If you leave the sauna on for too long unsupervised, you will burn down your entire house. If you answer the telephone while a thunderstorm is happening, you may get electrocuted to death. But you can also ignore that drunk caller and get a good night’s sleep by unplugging the phone before going to bed.

You will get blinded by a bee in the eye if you drive the moped without your helmet. You can use the TV to summon teletext. You can cool down your car’s overheating radiator by peeing on it instead of using coolant. But pee on electrical items like the TV or fusebox and you will again be electrified to death. Forget to put on your seatbelt and you will probably die in your next crash.

All this is ignoring the sheer weight of the car simulation too. That every piece must be screwed in place is ambitious enough. But the engine parts must also be tuned in perfect order, with bolts and nuts at a perfect level of tightness. Any part not sufficiently screwed in may pop out of your car like a cat leaping away from a cucumber. The tires will pop, the clutch will wear down over time, the exhaust fumes will come out an unhealthy black. Even if you get so far as completing the car, you will need to diagnose the damn thing before driving it.

This is admirable and intimidating in equal measure. If you’re anything like me, you’ll install a hefty set of mods that allow you to keep track of bolt sizes, or carry more than one item at a time, or even (oh my god) see the house’s light switches in the dark to avoid stumbling around for 5 minutes absolutely lost in your own bedroom. After that tractor-tipping crash left me inconsolable with self-pity, I went so far as to install a cheat console to spawn in all the items I’d lost. I could not face another hour of tractor driving while under review pressure. You will likely not have a Damoclean deadline. So you can, if you really want, opt for the glorious nightmare of permadeath mode - the Finnish vehicular equivalent of a no-hits onebro run.

In my case, I lacked the wherewithal to see the game through. I got halfway through building the Satsuma and gave up in favour of touring the game’s other destinations. Luckily, you can borrow a speedy looking car from Fleetari, the local mechanic, to see how it feels to be in a vehicle that can travel over 30 miles per hour. I rammed it full speed into a bus and caused a serious highway accident. The bus driver got out and simply started walking away in disgust or shock, I couldn’t tell which. When I looked inside, there was a single passenger: an old lady whose neck was bent at a hellish and unnatural angle.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / AmisTech Games

I left the rental car upside down and abandoned on the roadside, and cheatwarped my way home to try and continue work on the engine - one last go at seeing it to completion. Two or three days later, Fleetari would call my house phone to threaten me for not returning his ride. I hung up before he finished swearing.

I don’t have the strength of spirit (or time) to finish the Satsuma, or to indulge the many other activities I’ve read about. You can enter rally races, for example. You can chop firewood and deliver it to a “nearby” farmer. You can go to an island in the middle of the lake in a motorboat and catch a fish for your grandma. But all of this really needs a car, and looking up the next steps of that process I see that it involves finishing the engine, installing all the internal fixtures like seats, screwing on the doors, wiring every single component in the dash and under the hood, then finally filling up tanks with respective fluids and oils. If I get the car started, I’ll still need to troubleshoot any problems, like wacky alternator belts or wobbly distributors. I am in awe of this goofy, unforgiving game. I also do not want to play it anymore.

I hang up on grandma one last time while shaking with a hangover from drinking an entire bottle of vodka, as an invisible hornet flies around my head. My Summer Car is as merciless as it is crammed with simulatory detail. It does not like you as a person, and it likes you even less as a player. If you’re looking for your next masochistic gaming challenge, look not to the Soulslikes of the world, but to this Finnish life sim - a car mechanic’s hell/paradise that will drink hours of your life and piss it back out, stinking and pointless onto the carpet, tracing the yellow outline of an obnoxious smiley face.

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My Summer Car

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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My Summer Car Veers Into Early Access Next Week

A weird one

My Summer Car [ official site ], the drunk cousin of Jalopy , is coming to Steam Early Access next week. It’s a driving game and life simulator about building, fixing, and driving your own car, while also larking about and trying not to die in Finnish countryside of 1995. So sure, you can take your car apart and fine-tune it to win races, and you can also find a job to pay for beer then get smashed and die drunk in a ditch. That’s the full spectrum of ’90s Finnish rural life as I understand it.

So! My Summer Car is a life simulator focused around cars. You get hungry and thirsty and need to waz and all that, staying alive so you can dick about with cars. The simulated cars and the maintenance thereof are quite serious, down to needing to pick the right-sized spanner for different nuts. You can tune, fix, and upgrade your car, obviously. You can enter races. You can drive boats. You can pootle around the countryside as you please. You can get jobs to pay for all of this. You can rile up the police. Go to saunas. Siphon fuel. And you can get hammered and die terribly - naturally, it has permadeath.

I’ve had an eye on My Summer Car for ages, fascinated by the eclectic bits of both cars and life that it chooses to simulator. It’s a joke game in that it’s meant to be funny but it looks quite earnest - not another kooky game endlessly entertained by wacky physics. Also, I really dig the dev videos:

(11) My Summer Car: What is it all about! Watch on YouTube

That’s from April 2015, mind. This is more like how it looks now:

My Summer Car Greenlight Trailer Watch on YouTube

Amistech Games are bringing My Summer Car to early access on October 24th. They expect it should launch properly within a year, during which they’ll polish it and bosh in a story. Given that it’s a dicking about simulator, playing it unfinished doesn’t sound like too much of a problem.

My Summer Car

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