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Sometimes the name of a game tells you exactly what it's about. Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World, the latest from El Paso: Elsewhere and I Am Your Beast studio Strange Scaffold, does half the work for you. It's an open riff on the isekai boom that's consumed anime and manga for years, but it's also a straight-faced interrogation of the trend rather than pure parody, and it's all wrapped up inside a Final Fantasy 4 approach to Crazy Taxi. It's coming to PC later this year.
First, a crash course on isekai and the titular trope. Japan's entertainment industries have seen an explosion of stories about people dying of overwork, accidents, or sometimes natural causes, and then reincarnating (in some way or other) in another world, often a fantasy world with litRPG trappings. Getting hit by a truck became such a common way of killing off isekai protagonists that the truck itself – often a boxy moving or delivery truck – became its own meme and character. And now Truck-kun has his very own game (on Steam).
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"You have these systems that are very much set in the real world, including a delivery system, where you need to be paying attention, because the driver's got a job, right?" says developer Amanda Farough. "He's got to be out there delivering packages, doing the things that he needs to do, and also taking care of this lady who is in an anime world now and needs to kill bosses. It's a lot for this poor guy."
Farough says the game is "inherently very silly," and smartly tries not to take hitting pedestrians very seriously "because that might make people uncomfortable." Truck-kun is meant to be "adorable," which designer (and devious Bethesda QA veteran) Colin McInerney says is "funny, but also 100% true."
"You very much are a little guy," McInerney says, "and a lot of it has been still trying to make it feel like you're a very powerful truck, because you are just running into things repeatedly. And a lot of that has been the fine tuning that has gone toward making that feel so incredible to do. Because you're going to be hitting things with your truck 90% of the time. If that base interaction sucks to do and doesn't look good, doesn't feel good, then nobody's gonna like that game. It's like if Destiny 2 had bad shooting." And for absolute clarity, the driver is a character, but you also are Truck-kun.
A team of roughly 25 people have been working on Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World, and it all started with a suggestion from the wife of studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. He tells me his self-described "weeb" wife explained the truck-kun trope, and Nelson Jr.'s reaction was, "Oh, that's a game, that's my shit. And a half hour later, I came back to her with the full gameplay and narrative pitch."
This has, of course, led Nelson Jr. down a rabbit hole of isekai anime. He tips his hat to two modern hits: fantasy slice of life romp Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill, and genre-defying action comedy May I Ask for One Final Thing. With their own isekai story, Nelson Jr. and Strange Scaffold wanted to examine where this isekai boom is coming. Whyever would there be a huge appetite for stories, often starring Japanese people dying from overwork, about escaping the obligations of modern life and instead paling around a fantasy world?
"What appeals to a person about being completely pulled from their life and transported to a different place, even if that place is filled with danger and a lack of modern conveniences and an entire frame of logic that they've never encountered before?" Nelson Jr. wonders. "What draws the human mind to isekai and what is the human element of these stories? That's so much of what the project is meant to explore."
Many modern isekai stories are about raw escapism, and death without the inconvenience. "And I don't think you have to look too far to figure out why there's a fantasy to being anywhere but here," Nelson Jr. says. That gets channeled into the narrative of this surprisingly serious game, and cuts to the heart of this widespread boom in isekai stories.
"It's a core piece of pretty much everything I direct," he continues, "and in particular on this game, stripping away the artifice pretty quickly and getting into the meat of who these characters are and degrees to which they have even been unpleasant for themselves and for the people around them. And being in an isekai and being accompanied by a person who does not match their own patterns forces them to confront that.
"That is, I think, also found in the best isekai anime and manga. When you realize that death without the inconvenience is really a gate to exploring things you never had the time to sit down and process before. And if this entire journey, as it is in Truck-kun, is about coming back home, making sure that you have explored that before the world won't give you time to do so anymore. It really puts a ticking clock on the story that I think a lot of people are feeling keenly in their lives right now."
Nelson Jr. hits on a modern divide in isekai: a lot of them are decidedly not about getting home, instead devised to let their heroes live it up no-strings-attached somewhere else with no lingering burdens. "I think it's part of the reason the genre offers such a fantasy," he adds. "It's because it explicitly lets you off the hook."
