Mon Bazou is sort of about cars but mostly about being Canadian

Car fandom has existed for as long as cars have, but mine is a specific affliction that I feel has only recently collectively transitioned from “secret shame” to “fandom” thanks to, of course, the internet. Not for me the impossible expense of classic Ferraris or modern F1 cars; my people flock to OG Ford Capris and idiosyncratic Citroens that were either never sold in the UK or rusted away to nothing within ten years of purchase. There are, I must regretfully tell you, more than dozens of us. 

A key symptom of this disease is the ambition, rarely paired with the requisite skill, to fish some dust-covered ruin out of a shed and restore it to running order, something I’ve seen games nod to yet never successfully capture. I was thus instantly compelled by the Mon Bazou key art, which shows a 1990s BMW (E36 316 coupe, my car brain says) with a mismatched door and a wheel missing; getting it running and ready for low-stakes street-racing is the headline objective in what turns out to be a crude but easygoing simulation of smalltown Canadian life in 2005.

It’s a tutorial-free survival game that has a lot in common with the brutal Finnish slog of My Summer Car (E10 Datsun Cherry, not that you asked) but while that game delights in wilful sadism, Mon Bazou is a gentler and easier ride. It paints a stereotype of Canadians as generally cheery and wholesome in the way My Summer Car presents Finnish people as profane, vodka-marinated survivalists. 

I rapidly ran out of items and money to get the BMW running, but swiftly worked out that I could earn more by chopping down trees, putting them through the log splitter and selling them to my brother down the road as firewood. The fridge in my mobile home comes stocked with poutine and maple syrup, which must be taken daily to prevent death, but I could buy both in town and ultimately can cultivate my own potatoes and build my own maple syrup plant on land out back. The challenges are simple and so are the solutions.

The car is bust but there’s a pickup truck (and a quad bike) to use instead. You need to take the handbrake off before driving and you can drive by painstakingly rattling the gearstick through each gear, but you can also just use the shoulder buttons instead, and it mostly works in any forward gear anyway. The truck has a ratchet strap in the back which means if you somersault it into a field by misjudging the rudimentary vehicle handling it’s possible to roll it back over and get moving again. It feels closer to a Schedule 1-type life sim than a survival game.

Ultimately the goal is to fix the car to the point where you can street race with the other 20something slackers who collect outside the old general store each night to show off their underlit, paint-mismatched Mazdas. Getting there will take many days of felling wood, cultivating and consuming syrup and building relationships with the townspeople either in their daytime locations or in the bar after hours. You can lose points for vomiting on them, in the game as in life, but ultimately it all feels quite easygoing. 

While My Summer Car was about profanity and conflict and piss and deprivation and death, Mon Bazou is a simpler life sim in a cheerier town, where the man in the garage is always pleased to see you and your mother always appreciates a call. All of which is fine, but based on a few hours of play the car stuff is just the trimming, one more redneck task to occupy your endless spring. The tasks are simple enough to make me think I could do everything myself (there is of course no real tutorial, and a mass of wiki articles and YouTube videos to fill that gap) which is the classic trap of buying crappy old cars IRL, so perhaps there’s a deeper metaphorical relevance in there. It doesn’t have a subgame where you page through endless Facebook Marketplace listings looking for cut-price alloy wheels, though, so my quest for true in-game representation continues.