I was browsing my social feeds a couple of weeks ago when I came across an upcoming indie racing game called Linear S, and I immediately fell in love with it. In development by a two-person team called Advent Softworks, Linear S is a ’90s-style arcade racer, specifically one that looks to be inspired by Sega Touring Car Championship. But unlike most indie racers, it’s not going for a generic, neon-colored aesthetic that vaguely suggests the era it’s trying to capture. Linear S looks exactly the way ’90s racing games did, because it was built the way they were. Its Steam page has just gone live with a “coming soon” release date, and I can’t wait to play the final product.
If you’re familiar with those golden-era Sega and Namco arcade racers, Linear S should get your attention. It has Japanese performance cars rendered with just enough polygons and texturing to be recognizable, courses spearing through brightly lit tunnels to obscure a very limited draw distance, and stylized menus that would’ve been right at home on your Sega Saturn or PlayStation 1. There are four cars (an R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R, Lancer Evolution III, FD Mazda RX-7, and EG Honda Civic) and three tracks (Beginner, Advanced, and Expert). That’s all you would’ve gotten 30 years ago, so that’s all you’ll get here.
Linear S also has a unique control scheme, probably the main thing that separates it from the games that inspired it. The cars here don’t have typical automatic and manual transmission options—they all use an unconventional three-speed system that maps perfectly to the top three face buttons on a Saturn controller. The idea is that the usual AT/MT choice presents a barrier for less experienced players, as one of the game’s developers said in this interview on the Shiro! blog. Anyone who’s ever played Daytona USA will tell you that while the game might be very unrealistic, just like driving a real car, you have to master shifting yourself to be truly fast. Linear S bridges this divide with three manual gears that not only affect power delivery, but handling, too. First gear offers grip and acceleration, second lets you drift, and third allows you to reach max speed at the cost of understeer.
LINEAR S features a hybrid 3-gear system:
•1st gear for control and grip
•2nd gear for smooth drifting
•3rd gear for maximum speed! pic.twitter.com/eBkiFSFY25— Advent Softworks (@AdventSoftworks) June
4, 2025
Coupled with the very varied driving characteristics of its four-car roster, Linear S does sound more like a fighting game than your run-of-the-mill retro racer. Still, it’s the art direction that keeps me coming back. To build a game that truly looks like it belongs on a Sega Saturn, Advent assembled shaders and tools, and set limits to create a framework within the Unity game engine called Project S, designed to match the capabilities of Sega’s 1994 console as closely as possible.
In spirit, it’s much the same way the developer of Parking Garage Rally Circuit told me he’d built his game when I spoke to him last year, but Project S seems even more stringent. Linear S has a resolution of 320×224, targets 30 frames per second (though 60 will be an option), draws no more than 2,000 quads per second, uses mesh transparencies, and separates its 3D and 2D layers, just like the Saturn did.
The attention to detail extends to the handling. Developer Daniel Sato put it well in that interview I linked to above: “What makes it fun to go from Side by Side to Daytona USA is that no matter how good you are at one, you’ll have to relearn everything in the other.” These old racing games all felt different because the raw fundamentals they were built on, like their physics systems, were built from scratch every time. A pair of games could offer two completely unique interpretations of vehicle dynamics, run through the filter of rudimentary tech. To see what I mean, play the arcade port of Ridge Racer that just came out last week, and then try the PlayStation port. They may look similar, and they might both prioritize drifting, but the way the player initiates and carries those powerslides is totally different.
I’ve embedded a video of gameplay of the Saturn version of Sega Touring Car Championship below. Watch it for a second and tell me Linear S doesn’t look like an authentic tribute. (STCC is a very striking game, but unfortunately not a great one to actually play, so hopefully Advent improves in that regard.)
It’s easy to look back at games from decades ago and discount them as twee, but in reality, plenty of developers were simply trying to make the most realistic experience they could at the time, with the tools available to them. Linear S comes off like a game reaching to replicate the sensations of motorsport, using technology that we know today is woefully ill-equipped to fully do the job. That’s why I added it to my Steam wishlist immediately.
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#Daytona #USA #Ridge #Racer #Indie #Game #Blast
