How many forklifts can u do? Actually, Do U Even Forklift? Aha ha ha. See what I did there? Didn’t you? It was related to the title of this game by Sylwester Osik (a.k.a Garage 5). I very expertly used my wordsmith skills, though no AI could ever achieve, a.k.a. dad jokes, straight from the land of Punsville. Now we’ve got the intro paragraph out of the way, let’s move on, shall we?
The premise is simple in the game: use a forklift to move stuff out of the way so you can go forth and do other stuff, now that your shift is complete. But what, may you ask, does that entail? With very minimal instructions, as it’s somewhat intuitive, you move a forklift truck around some ickle scenes where a car is parked in your space, and you have to move it. The complexity increases as you progress.
Typically, this will mean lowering your forks, stuffing them under the chassis, then gently wheeling it away and dumping it in the sea. Well, you can do that. What’s quite fun about Do U Even Forklift? is the lack of pressure to beat a clock, monitor fuel levels, or worry about how you place a car. You can turn it on its side, dump it in the water like mentioned, or considerately place it blocking a one-way road.
Those complexities will shift when you have to place a specific colour car in a parking space, or move an electric car that is plugged into a charger. Should the cable disconnect, you have to restart the stage. Other later stages include washing cars before moving them, or uprooting sakura trees and dropping them in a planter. Do U Even Forklift? offers a fair variety of basic gameplay.
While there are no timers and it’s mostly casual, that doesn’t mean the game is without any sort of frustration. There’s a reason that you need a forklift driving licence in real life, as it operates differently from a car. That’s not to say it isn’t manageable, but there are a lot of confined spaces where it’s very easy to get trapped, and without being able to see the rear wheels, you just wing it until eventually restarting the stage. That visibility is a key issue, as the game also has a hovering menu of collectables that remains on screen throughout. Drive past it, and you can do nuffink to fix it. No menu options, transparency parameters… nuffink.
Another thing that Do U Even Forklift? gets wrong is the assumption of the player. Like most indies, this has a Japanese inspiration but not from a Japanese developer. katakana graces the screen in a predominantly English-language game. Sure, ‘ramen’ and ‘car wash’ make sense when you look at the structures, but… why? For a good number of stages, if you’re like me, you might overthink a stage and make it more complex than needed. For example, an early stage depicted a van with four red arrows on the back. Without anything else besides the four vending machines, I meticulously placed them on the back, perfectly lined up, only to find out that all I had to do was dump a car on the back. It made no sense, but job done, move on.
What the game does get right is the relatively pick-up-and-play short stages. While some of the puzzles require a bit of thought in terms of expectations, there are no complicated controls, just getting used to the manoeuvrability. Do U Even Forklift? has a What the Car? What the Golf? style of presentation and title cards, but it is void of all humour aside from dumping a random car in the water. There’s collectable ramen, too, but when playing on the Switch 2, is there any reason to seek achievements? Depends on the player, but it doesn’t really encourage repeat plays. An interesting indie, and mostly fun, but the physics and lack of direction (sometimes quite literally) let it down.
