“We loved making this into a goofy, irreverent, and kind of chill experience”: Wheel World celebrates bike culture with its vibey open world

One of the big joys that can come from playing an open world game is when you can get in the zone when traveling – connecting with the game in a way where you just know where you want to go and letting your instinct with the controller kick in. The upcoming Wheel World from developer Messhof taps into the feeling well with its take on an open-world bicycling game, tasking you with saving the world with the help of a spirit companion.

While checking out the latest games from Annapurna Interactive during the week of The Game Awards, I played the opening of Wheel World and spoke with tech lead Sam Loeschen and co-art director Dann Beeson about building a game about biking culture and how the game changed from their original vision of a more "somber" open world.

On your bike

You play as cyclist Kat, a new arrival at the titular Wheel World – a large island built around cycling culture and the communities that thrive on riding on the open roads. When Kat uncovers a mysterious shrine, she discovers that Wheel World is in danger, and has to explore the island to find other ruins while expanding her cycling skills and upgrading her bike to perform a great ritual to save Wheel World.

Interestingly enough, Wheel World took some time to find its tone and structure. According to the developers, it was initially called Ghost Bike and focused more on a somber experience, but it eventually found its new, chill identity throughout development.

"With Ghost Bike, I think at first we thought the game was going to be a lot more like a somber exploration, like with [The Legend of Zelda: ]Breath of the Wild, which had a lot of excitement at the time when we started, but we slowly found it was a pretty natural evolution into something else," says tech lead Sam Loeschen. "We loved making this into a goofy, irreverent, and kind of chill experience that was engaging to play."

Wheel World allows players to freely ride bicycles to explore different regions and participate in various activities. In addition to finding ruins, you can meet up with fellow cyclists to compete in races, earning you upgrades for your bike. I really enjoyed the feel and flow of using the bicycle, which felt accurate and tactile in its controls. There's a sense of weight and heft when barreling down roads, pulling off drifts with the bike, and using spirit powers to get an extra boost, which was very satisfying.

According to the developers, particular attention was paid to the game's bike controls and physics. They noted that most games tend to treat bikes like cars when it comes to controls, but with Wheel World, they wanted the bike to feel like an extension of the player character – with players finding a "harmony" between the two as they explored the world.

"We're pretty avid about [bicycles], and it felt natural to work on that with this game. Like I ride my bike to the coworking space, I'm thinking about how I will work that into the game. I come from a graphics background. I'm not a physics programmer, so I had to learn a lot of that to make this feel good. It was also a very iterative process, and we were trying to strike that line between sim and arcade, and we had to figure out how technical it was and how many affordances we gave the player. But we're delighted where we landed, though. I feel very confident about how we nailed it with this game."

Like Dungeons of Hinterberg, Wheel World presents a colorful, cell-shaded visual style to illustrate its inviting and open-ended world. Getting to ride around in between activities to take in the sights and hear a soundtrack curated by the indie label Italians Do It Better was so captivating, and I couldn't get enough of exploring. It's the kind of chill exploration game that begs players to take their time, and I'm already itching to take Wheel World out for another spin when it releases later this year.

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