Did I say that InnerSpace had a stark minimalism to it? Well get a load of this!

Race the Sun is a score-chasing game, a sort of 3D auto-runner where you manouevre a hover-vehicle through a slightly abstracted field of obstacles. Your… car-plane thing… is mostly ground-bound apart from ramps and jump powerups, which help you get sweet air and avoid crashing for a bit. The goal is to get diddlybops as you advance between zones, which have different kinds of hazards.

The flat, low-poly style is a strong visual choice that’s well-executed on. It (as well as the motive capabilities of the glide-speeder) reminds me of Argonaut’s X and 3D Space Tank. The goals are much different here though, being modelled more after the type popularised by mobile runner games: you have missions to complete, which work towards unlocks for subsequent runs. As is often the case when a game is mechanically fun to engage with, this creates an addictive loop.

Let me elaborate a little further on the gameplay. Your swoop-bike banking and swerving around the rigid geometry that‘s quick to race towards you. Picking up chains of glow-bobs, looking for a telltale beacon of a powerup as you pick your next path on the infinite horizontal plane. Staying in the light of the setting sun; straying in to shadow slows down your solar-powered conveyance, while the slow descent of that luminous orb foretells the end of your run. It’s really quite thrilling!

I played Race the Sun on Vita, the portability of which suited the game design better than PC or PS3/4 but is otherwise kind of a dud port. Mission progress was bugged—in the player’s favour—by awarding you extra pips out of nowhere. The timer for resetting the randomly generated world only ticked down during actual game time, whereas it seems to be intended that you would get a new set of maps each day. My most nitpicky observation: the screen resolution was not quite sufficient to read the pithy comments when your run is launched. And of course the “free mode” DLC is not available on the PSN version. It did at least get the update that added the maze mode, a slightly slower-paced way to play with a higher camera viewpoint.

Still, I had a good time with it anyway. Considering the small size of the team that developed this Kickstarter-funded game, the ports being a little under-supported is more understandable. But you’re much better off getting it on iOS, that seems like a more natural home by far.