Clustertruck is a game about the floor being lava, and the floor is a highway. You play from the first person, you jump, and everything under your feet is a speeding truck driven by someone who should not be driving. Landfall Games developed it. tinyBuild published it. It came out September 27, 2016, for Linux, macOS, the PlayStation 4, Windows, and the Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch port following on March 15, 2018.
It is exactly as stupid as that sounds, and it is very nearly as good.
Trailer, via tinyBuildGAMES.
Wilhelm Nylund and a Fantasy About Traffic
The idea started with Landfall’s founder, Wilhelm Nylund, picturing himself leaping across trucks to escape traffic. That is the whole pitch, and Clustertruck never pretends otherwise. The game is a physics toy with a goal at the end of it.
The structure is nine worlds, ten levels each. Reach the designated goal by jumping from truck to truck. The trucks move in real time and collide with each other. They flip. They tip over. Land on the ground and you get a game over. Touch an obstacle and the same. There is no fighting, no shooting, no story to sit through. There is only the next truck.
That restraint is the best thing about Clustertruck. It knows what it is.
Nine Worlds, Ten Levels, One New Problem Each Time
Each world introduces a single new obstacle, and the game trusts you to work it out. The third world adds ice, which makes the trucks slippery. The fourth adds lasers. The sixth adds a boulder that you have to run away from, which is a sentence that makes sense only here.
The escalation is clean because it is legible. You always know what killed you. The trucks are the variable, not the rules.
The player can sprint or slow down time during a level, and both abilities matter more than they first appear. Sprinting is how you cross a gap that looks impossible. Slowing time is how you read a pileup before it eats you. Clustertruck is a game about looking ahead, and the time controls are the game admitting that looking ahead is hard.
The Score and the Soundtrack
Clustertruck was praised for its gameplay, its graphics, and its original soundtrack. That last one carries more weight than it usually would. A game this chaotic needs music that holds a tempo, and Clustertruck’s soundtrack keeps a run feeling like a run instead of a random series of accidents.
Bonus points come from skipping trucks or staying airborne. Those points buy power-ups: grappling hooks, double jumps, speed boosts, air dashes, and a jet pack. The jet pack is the one that breaks the game open, and it is better for it.
Here is a short comparison of what the game asks of you at two different points.
| Element | Base level | With power-ups |
|---|---|---|
| Movement | Jump between moving trucks | Double jumps, air dashes, jet pack |
| Recovery | None; ground or obstacle ends the run | Grappling hooks, speed boosts |
| Scoring | Skip trucks, stay airborne | Same, but reachable in longer chains |
| Failure state | Game over on contact | Game over on contact |
The failure state never changes. That is the point.
A Level Editor and a Twitch Chat That Can Ruin You
Clustertruck ships with a level editor. Players can build custom levels and share them, which extends the game well past the nine worlds Landfall built. That is a real feature, not a bullet point.
Then there is the Twitch integration, which is the strangest thing in the package. Developers and Twitch users can modify gameplay by voting in the chat. The modifications include rickrolling, time manipulation, color changing, on-screen messages, exploding trucks, earthquakes, laser trucks, high and low gravity, and inverted controls.
Read that list again. Someone can vote to invert your controls while you are mid-jump. The Twitch integration is either the best streaming feature of 2016 or a war crime, and it is not always clear which.
The Switch Port and the Control Problem
The Nintendo Switch version arrived March 15, 2018, and it was primarily criticized for its controls. That criticism is fair and it is not a small thing in a game built entirely on precision jumping.
Clustertruck lives or dies on whether the jump you intended is the jump you get. On the platforms where it works, it works because the input is tight enough to trust. When that trust goes, the game stops being funny. A physics comedy needs a straight man, and the straight man is your controller.
Nine Worlds and a Boss Fight at the End
Clustertruck culminates in a boss fight in the final world. It is the one moment the game steps outside its own formula, and it lands because the formula has been drilled into you for eighty levels by then.
The boss fight is not the reason to play. The reason to play is the fourth time you clear a level you were certain was broken, and you realize the trucks were never the obstacle. Your own timing was.
What Clustertruck Gets Right and What It Doesn’t
The best thing Clustertruck does is refuse to explain itself. It drops you onto a highway, tells you the ground is death, and lets the trucks teach you the rest. Nine worlds of that is a lot of teaching, and the game mostly earns it because each world adds one clean idea rather than three muddy ones.
The worst thing is that the difficulty curve is a wall in places, and the Switch port makes that wall taller than it needs to be. A game this dependent on feel cannot afford a version where the feel is off. If you are choosing a platform, that matters more than the graphics.
The Twitch integration is the part worth watching, and not entirely for good reasons. It is a genuine experiment in letting an audience reach into a single-player game and pull the levers. It is also the kind of feature that turns a skill game into a spectacle, and those are not the same thing. Landfall built both and shipped them side by side.
Clustertruck is not a deep game. It is a fast one, a funny one, and a well-made one, and it understands that a physics joke only works if the physics are honest. The trucks collide, flip, and tip over exactly as they should. That is the whole trick, and it holds up.
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