Broom Racer pays you for flying too close to things

It is a first person party racer where you sit on a flying broom that tops out at 360 km/h. The broom is simulated as a physical object rather than a vehicle glued to a racing line, so it carries momentum, it can be knocked off course, and a collision does not scrape you along a wall and let you carry on. It throws you off the broom, and getting back on is the cost.

The interesting decision is where speed comes from. There is no boost button, and no pickup that simply hands you one. Speed is paid out for risk: for staying as close to the ground, the walls or the ceiling as you can hold, for threading a tight boost hoop rather than the comfortable one, for tucking into the slipstream of the player in front. Every one of those is a choice to move nearer to the thing that ends your race.

The tracks keep asking the question. You are free to fly wherever you like — the route is only suggested by hoops, not fenced — and courses split into alternatives, with fiery hoops marking the line that is faster and more likely to hurt. Items exist, and they matter, but they sit on top of a race that has already been decided by how close each player was willing to fly.

The world does not hold still while you commit to a line either. Cyclopses live in the mountains and object to being disturbed. High speed trains run through the same tight tunnels the quick route goes through. A moving obstacle turns a memorised track back into a judgement call, which is the whole difference between a course you learn once and one you have to keep reading.

How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves is the essay this game is built on top of. Its argument is that players will take the safe, reliable route to victory even when that route flattens the game, so the work is making the exciting route the attractive one. Broom Racer does not bolt an incentive onto a safe line. It takes away the safe line’s ability to win at all: flying down the middle of the tunnel is never punished, it is simply slow forever, because the accelerator is the wall.

What Mirror’s Edge Catalyst Should Have Learned From Burnout Paradise is the other half of it. That piece argues an open space only pays off when its events, its routes, its navigation and its mastery all run through the same system — Burnout paid you for oncoming traffic and near misses, so driving dangerously and driving well became the same skill. Open flight over a mountain has the same opportunity and the same trap. If the hoops turn out to be the real track, the freedom is decoration; if they guide too loosely, players spend the race lost rather than committed.

Procedural Generation Only Works When Something Checks It is where the production risk sits. The maps are a mix of generated and hand crafted, which is the sensible way to get a lot of mountain without hand placing all of it — but a generator that can put an unflyable gap on the fastest line will put one there eventually, on someone else, on launch day. In a game whose quick route is deliberately a few centimetres from a surface, the tolerance for a badly placed rock is close to zero, and the rules that reject bad output are the feature rather than the plumbing.

Broom Racer is by Ether GmbH, self-published, filed under Racing, and coming to Windows. Steam lists it as coming soon with a Q3 2026 window. It runs single-player and multiplayer, with online co-op, and it asks for a gamepad.

The player bots are worth a line of their own. A party racer that needs a full lobby of friends is a game you play twice; one that fills the grid on its own means the risk-and-reward loop is there on a Tuesday night, which is when a racing game either sticks or quietly stops being opened.

If the pull here is the movement itself — the idea that a game can be worth playing purely because of how it feels to move through space, before anything is built around it — the untitled werewolf game is the purest version of that bet on this list: no name, no store page, one developer, and a movement system carrying the whole thing. Broom Racer has more around it, but it is wagering on the same feeling.