With a lot of modern retro-revivals, you can often sense that developers ‘Commit to the Bit,’ adding in modern tweaks and flourishes but borrowing the aesthetic from games of old. The thing with Parking Garage Rally Circuit is that this is not a bit; this is a full-on love letter to arcade racers of yore. With a singular mechanic demanding the most out of its players, this game should’ve gotten old fairly quickly. But unlike parallel parking, racing over and over again through these courses is an exhilarating joy.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit presents itself from the word “go” as a long-lost arcade racer. Whether you turn up all the tweaks on CRT-settings, pixel display and colors or jump into a rally right away, this game revels in its love for the dawn of the 3D-gaming era of the early ‘90s. The goal is pretty straightforward. Throughout several parking garages you race against ghosts to get the fastest lap on the track. Occasionally, you may have to deal with a hazard like falling rocks or other vehicles crossing your lanes. Your car doesn’t have a particularly high top speed, but that’s where drifting comes into play. Unlike Mario Kart, where a drift boost gives you a single burst of speed, Parking Garage Rally Circuit wants you to chain together these boosts. Each one increases your top speed if you can time it just right. Every corner becomes an opportunity to set new records.

While that may sound rather simple, the delicate balance of trying to stay on course and wanting to increase your speed is anything but. There’s always the risk that your increased top speed boosts you straight into a wall or sends you flying off the track. The true beauty here is in the lovingly designed courses. You may not think much of a parking garage as a place with a lot of variety, but developer Wallaber has done an excellent job of making every track so memorable and tightly designed. For instance, the first garage teaches you the tight corners; one based at an airport with vertical corkscrews sees you driving across every level of the parking lot. Toss onto that an amazingly upbeat ska-like soundtrack and I was instantly transported back to the vibes of Ridge Racer, OutRun2000 and Crazy Taxi.

And that presentation simply never lets up. The physics feel a bit wonky at times, but as you can drive into any environmental object and open up new paths, there’s plenty of fun shortcuts to make your own. Just as long as you pass through the next checkpoint, it does not matter what height you fall from or what other objects you crash into. If you can keep that drift going, even better. Spinning out and messing up is also never too punishing as restarting your rally is near instantaneous. It makes the game one of those amazing pick-up-and-play titles that feels right at home on Switch. If you have some friends over, you can have an amazing local head-to-head rally on these parking lots.

Which brings me to my only gripe, which is that Parking Garage Rally Circuit does not have an online multiplayer mode. While you can race against ghosts from other players on the leaderboard, which is frankly a fantastic way to pick up on new shortcuts, playing with someone else can only be done locally. I understand that possibly the limitations of the Godot engine or having the game run so smoothly on Switch are the reason for this, but I’d have loved to play this game with friends online. Additionally, I can see players being disappointed with the lack of variety modes and only eight parking garages to race on. Though there is DLC available to race on a set of European courses, I do think that mastering the levels from the base game is plenty challenging enough. Especially if you want to unlock the harder races, for which you’ll need to end in first place on all tracks.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit knows exactly what it is: a tight racing game that feels like a victory lap of the arcade racers that inspired it. The controls are perfect. The visuals are somehow of its time yet timeless. And when everything clicks together this is a phenomenal racing game for both experts and newcomers alike. It would’ve been nice to play together with friends online, but I suppose their ghosts will have to do. This game feels like one of those small hidden gems that’s going to stand the test of time, one that doesn’t require tweaking with cars or switching between manual or automatic shifting. It isn’t clinging to the past but rather celebrating those that came before. Let the meter run a little bit longer, because being stuck in this parking garage has been nothing but pure joy.