Does not Commute

Does not Commute is another arcade game from studio Mediocre, this time built on an unusual idea: every drive of a single vehicle from point A to point B gets "recorded" once finished and becomes part of the traffic for every subsequent drive. The player thus gradually watches the city grow denser with their own past attempts — reversing into an intersection where a truck previously drove through recklessly quickly becomes a matter of life and death. Controls are simple, tilting the phone or using virtual controls for steering and gas, but the tension rises with every additional car the player has added to the road themselves.

Visually the game goes for a flat, colorful retro style with townspeople who each have a short story and an urgent reason why they need to get across town right now — from a doctor rushing to a patient to a fugitive fleeing a police chase. This layer of dark humor and absurdity turns each drive into a small vignette rather than just a mindless stretch between two points on a map, and the player gradually learns more about the fates of individual characters.

The traffic "time loop" system was a refreshing idea at the time of release for how to extract a sense of rising escalation from a mobile arcade game without needing complex level design — the world grows dense with traffic that the player has literally created themselves through their own previous drives. The game is paid, with no ads and no microtransactions, in keeping with the honest approach studio Mediocre also showed with the earlier Smash Hit.

Why play it: For players looking for an original twist on arcade driving, where your own past drives create increasingly dangerous traffic.