Unfortunately, if Oblivion’s defining, revelatory experience was spotting the ruins of an ancient castle perched on a distant hillside and realizing you could wander there if you wanted to, then Fuel’s defining experience was realizing that its world was vast on a soul-deadening, terrible scale. After downloading the demo, I began free drive mode and picked a direction and took off– and drove and drove, through the scrub and the dirt. The sun began to set; my bike’s headlight came on automatically. I drove. Suddenly wondering what the hell I was doing, I quit and deleted the demo, intending never to return to it, but later that evening I was seized by the idea that perhaps Fuel had unintentionally created the first game that dove into the depths of existential absurdity, a disguised meditation on the ultimate pointlessness of everything. Might Fuel actually be a game that explores the place of mankind in the cosmos by placing him in this ludicrously illogical, staggeringly gigantic world for no apparent reason? Was Fuel the secret Waiting for Godot of video games?
