Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is truly a piece of art made to spark internal discussion. No other game has as deep ties to philosophy and the works of the human mind. The way this is showcased in the game design and storytelling is truly incredible and shows how far the videogame industry has come.
For example there is a course where Garfield and his friends will be racing on the ruins of Ancient Egypt, a civilization well known for pushing the boundaries of architecture and building the impossible. On this course you will constantly be bumping into walls that force you to stop and back up slowly to resume racing. Some might call this extremely annoying, but they just fail to see the genius of these types of story implications through gameplay.
The way you abruptly stop when crashing into the many walls of the course parallels the hardships the ancient civilization of Egypt had to face when building the tracks you race on. The Egyptians would face a wall, have to back up and re-evaluate how their process of building the pyramids would continue, just as how you, the player, have to do in a race.
The game is full of details like this. On one course you will fly out of bounds all the time only to be returned to the track immediately. This simulates the shackles of society and how they don't let us fly away into freedom. On another course your car can be flipped upside down against a wall leaving you permanently stuck until the race finishes. This is to showcase the unfair nature of life and how you don't have the power to fix your own problems every time.
Despite it's cartoony art direction, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing hosts some very dark and depressing themes that will unfortunately just fly over the heads of most of it's players. It is an extremely ambitious game that only appeals to a very small audience but that audience will be changed for the rest of their lives, if they truly decide to invest the time required into exploring the intricate lore of the game.
This game is an underappreciated modern masterpiece.
