The Simple Brilliance Of You Suck At Parking’s Start Screen

The best thing for a video game to do is start strong, and that’s by making a cool start screen or main menu screen. It’s something that nowadays is kind of just there, but don’t you love seeing one that has left a good impression just as you press start/any button/any key?

You Suck At Parking, the silly little car game about parking cars located in hard-to-reach places understands the appeal of a start screen. And it has a brilliant one by doing something very simple: sell the game’s premise.

Don’t press any button during You Suck At Parking’s start screen and let it roll, and you’ll see.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the title screen is not just a screen, it’s rendered in-game. Each letter of the title is a physics object, and you’ll also notice some parking spots around the screen.

Just as the low-key, relaxing music is playing, cars start zooming into the screen with horns blaring. And then chaos unravels.

The cars are all aiming towards the parking spot, and as the game title taunts you every time, these other cars all suck at parking. Some will hit the tree, some will smash towards the title jumbling up the letters around. Some will totally be off the mark, careening off-screen. And over time, you’ll see about 30 cars all piled up in one part of the title screen, crashed, smashed, and only a few if any landed on the parking spot.

Thankfully, the letters in the title can’t really spell out something awful even when it’s all jumbled up after all the cars smashing through it.

You Suck At Parking shows what to expect of the video game with this start screen. It has physics-based shenanigans. The car controls are a bit loosey-goosey and can take wild turn angles. Smashing stuff is part of the fun. And expect the actual action of parking a car in the right spot to be challenging, but you’ll have a laugh along the way.

Gamer Matters used to have a special award for Best Main Menu in our annual Game Of The Year Awards, but has been retired due to, well, there are just not many games with fun, cool, or meaningful start screens or main menus over the years. We don’t have any plans on reviving that, but if we were, You Suck At Parking is a shoo-in for this award this year. No contest.

Its simple brilliance of communicating all of the games’ appeal right at the start shows the developers’ understanding of what kind of game they are making, and what they want you to expect from it. And I wish more games would spare the resources for a sick intro or start screen.

I understand that it’s superfluous in the grand scheme of things, where resources could be better spent in other areas of game development. But cool intro or start screens will be remembered fondly over time. And this one is still living in my head rent-free, alongside the literal explosive start of Infamous and Dragon Age Inquisition, the simple and clean vibes at the start of all the Kingdom Hearts games, and the devolving menu screen that reflects your current progress in the downhill spiral campaign of Spec Ops: The Line.

You Suck At Parking is out now on PC and Xbox, and coming to PlayStation and Switch next year. It’s also available now on Xbox and PC Game Pass. You can find our review of the game here.