Strange Scaffold, the developer behind I Am Your Beast; El Paso, Elsewhere; An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown; Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator; and Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, has announced another new game with possibly the studio’s most ridiculous title yet: Truck–kun is Supporting Me From Another World?! And yes, the punctuation is part of it.
Truck-kun is a vehicular action visual novel about isekaing as many things as possible. Carissa, a young marketing agent, is struck by a truck on her way to a new job and gets isekaied into a fantasy world full of monsters, swords, and magic. At the start, she’s far too weak to unlock the Galactic Gate or defeat the Skeleton King or do any of the other fantastical things she needs to do to get back to her home. That’s where you come in: you drive the isekai truck, and you use it to smash into as many things as possible to power her up.
Hitting objects powers her up, while hitting pedestrians turns them into monsters and sends them over to fight Carissa so she can level up and get strong enough to escape. You can see what Carissa is doing in a little box on the bottom of your screen, so it’s like playing one video game actively so you can passively play another. I kinda dig the juxtaposition here!
Of course, running into everything you see with a truck is generally frowned upon, so you also have to avoid the cops. They ruin everything.
Though I’m no stranger to anime tropes, this was, in fact, how I learned that “truck-kun” is apparently a meme referencing the very common recurring isekai plot of getting hit with a truck and sent into another world. The running joke is that truck-kun is a repeat character across various anime and manga whose entire purpose in the world is to kill people and send them into fantasy adventures elsewhere. In that regard, this Truck-kun is clearly just doing his job, though you gotta feel for the hapless driver who’s stuck dealing with the consequences.
A press release advertises a soundtrack composed by David Mason, who also did the music for the spooky fishing game Dredge. It also lists as one of the key features “A giant, screaming man whose meat you can legally drive through.” I don’t know what that means.
Truck–kun is Supporting Me From Another World?! is currently planned for later this year on PC via Steam.