MudRunner

MudRunner is a game where you take a 1980s Soviet truck and drive it directly into the Earth’s crust while trying to deliver logs. Not gold, not medicine—logs. Trees you chopped down, and now must lovingly return to the forest. It’s eco-ironic.
You start the game with a truck that handles like a sleepy walrus in rollerblades. You think, “This won’t be so bad.” And then—mud. Not just any mud. The kind of mud that has opinions. The kind of mud that grabs your tires and says, “You live here now.”
Every mission is a slow, squishy battle between you and gravity. You’ll spend 45 minutes hauling three sticks across terrain that looks like it was designed by a sadistic oatmeal monster. You’ll try to cross a river, misjudge the current, and suddenly your truck is doing synchronized swimming.
There’s no music. No flashy HUD. Just engine sounds, occasional bird chirps, and the distant laughter of the developers watching you try to reverse uphill in a hurricane made of dirt. It’s pure vibes, and the vibe is: “You should’ve brought the winch.”
Also, there’s no tutorial. The game throws you in like, “Here’s a truck. Here’s a bog. Figure it out, comrade.” And you do. Eventually. After crying. Twice.
Multiplayer is where friendships go to die beautifully. You’ll all meet up to rescue Dave’s truck from a ravine, only for everyone to also get stuck. Now it’s a convoy of sadness. You form a daisy chain of winches, each vehicle screaming through the mud like a cursed conga line of diesel-powered despair.
Final score: 10 foggy forests and 3 existential breakdowns per log drop-off.
MudRunner is what you play when you want to feel the thrill of achieving absolutely nothing very, very slowly—and somehow love every painful, sludgy second of it.

imagine playing for 10 hours, crashing it 2 mph and losing all your cargo and having to drive to the wood place for another 5 hours to get wood and reset all your progress

First map: Accidentally spilled a load within 10m of the destination, twice.
Second map: Accidentally dropped a load instead of offloading it, after going across the map
10/10 this game makes me actively suicidal.

1. Bring logs through swamp
2. Get stuck
3. Bring another truck
4. Get stuck again
10/10 would bring another truck again
P.S. Recommended for people who likes vehicles especially heavy machinery and tired of competitive games.

Drive on a road.
realise i can take a shortcut.
take the shortcut
the shortcut is takes longer than the road.
alr fine, im already here, lets continue
get stuck
drive other vehicle there to help
get it stuck too
get mad
reset
drive around
take a shortcut
get stuck
get other vehicle to help
get it stuck too
quit game
cry myself to sleep
play again tomorrow
repeat

the muddy dark souls of truck driving which has 3 ruels.
1. there is no shortcut
2. there is no shorter way
3. you can't get around that one puddle whitout flipping
10/10 btw

Have you ever wanted to just get behind the wheel of something with enough torque to reverse the rotation of the earth? Something which burns through enough diesel to start a new ice age? A machine that epitomizes the destruction of nature’s only remaining habitat? That was, of course, a rhetorical question because I know the answer is yes and the game that does it is MudRunner.

You know how first-person shooters let you live the fantasy of just going nuts and shooting things you can’t normally shoot in real live? MudRunner does that too. But instead of shooting people, you destroy mother earth. The game presents you with a handful of levels or maps with each requiring you to select a truck, attach a trailer, go to a logging station and transport logs to a mill. Do it a few times, move to the next map and do it again. There are certain optional challenges on each map, like finding secret areas and smashing pumpkins, reaching all outposts and things of that nature. These give you something extra to do and are always welcome and rewarding with achievements or a beautiful vista of the Siberian wilderness.
At its core, the game is a careful driving game in which you drive soviet era off road trucks, transporting logs from point A to B. The meat of the game is in the driving mechanics. They, depending on your difficulty settings, determine how engaging the driving will be. You can manage gears, differential lock, all wheel drive, fuel consumption, trailer attachments and winch yourself out of a jam. The trucks are slow and have a hefty feel to them. Turning the key puffs up a cloud of black smoke, signalling to the heavens that you are about to burn through some serious dinosaur liquid.

While I was initially reminded of Euro Truck Simulator, the game is only similar in its simulator nature but not much else. You complete transportation objectives in both but that’s where it ends. While I did miss it, MudRunner does not present any economy mechanics like those in ETS. Instead, we are given extra challenges to complete and I was fine by that. The game can be easily played with a controller or keyboard, solo or co-op and runs fine on a steam deck.

All in all, MudRunner scratches an ich for a more particular driving experience in which you need to take it slow and either think things through or bring an extra vehicle to winch you out of an inevitable mud jam. Although brief at 13 hours, I enjoyed my time with it.