RV There Yet? Review

1.3 million copies sold in its first week. For a debut game from a five-person studio in Skövde, Sweden, that number is absurd. RV There Yet? by Nuggets Entertainment arrived on Steam on October 21, 2025, climbed the trending charts faster than anyone expected, and became the latest entry in what Xbox's Chris Charla has called gaming's "return to fun." The question worth asking, though, is whether the game behind the sales figures actually holds up.

Mabutts Valley's canyon stretch

The premise is beautifully stupid. Your vacation is over. The main road home is closed. You and up to three friends need to drive your recreational vehicle through Mabutts Valley, a stretch of terrain that includes beaches, forests, canyons, and caves, all of which seem specifically designed to destroy your RV and your friendships simultaneously. You can check out more co-op chaos in our latest gaming guides and reviews.

Gameplay

The core loop is straightforward: load the RV with supplies, pick a driver, and try not to die. The driving itself uses a manual gear system, though you'll rarely need to go past second gear. The physics are the star here. Every item you load into the RV behaves independently, which means a badly packed cooler can fly through a window the moment you hit a bump, and a poorly positioned player can tumble out the back door on a steep incline.

In the early sections, this is genuinely brilliant. The beach and canyon environments are well-designed for the kind of controlled chaos that makes co-op games click. The driver is sweating over the wheel while passengers are scrambling to retrieve items, fix the RV, or fight off wildlife. It works.

The problems start to accumulate as the game progresses. The cave section is the clearest example of the design losing its grip. The pacing slows dramatically, and there's a lighting inconsistency that borders on a game-breaking bug: in our two-player session, one player could see the cave environment clearly while the other was navigating near-total darkness. There is no brightness slider. No accessibility option to compensate. It's the kind of oversight that suggests the game was tested under specific hardware conditions and not broadly enough.

Late-game physics puzzles also start to feel like they were designed by someone who had just discovered physics engines. The winch system, which is genuinely clever earlier on, gets pushed into scenarios that feel more like guesswork than problem-solving.

Enemy encounters

The wildlife encounters deserve their own section because they represent the game's most uneven design decisions. Bears require bear spray to deal with. If you don't have bear spray in your inventory when a bear attacks, you're simply done. There's no alternative, no workaround, no skill expression. It's a binary item check dressed up as an encounter.

The snake is somehow worse. It appears to be indifferent to everything you throw at it, including hammers. There's no clear indication of how to counter it, and the game provides no tutorial or hint system for either enemy. The first time you encounter a bear without spray, you'll lose progress and have no idea why. That's not difficult design, that's incomplete design.

Load up before you roll out

Graphics and audio

The visual presentation is one of the game's genuine strengths, particularly in the opening environments. The beach campsite and canyon sections have a colourful, slightly exaggerated art style that suits the tone perfectly. The RV itself looks great, and the way it deforms and accumulates damage over a run gives it personality.

The audio design leans into the absurdity. The cassette tapes you can play in the RV add character, and the sound effects for physics collisions are satisfying in the way that only chaotic co-op games can pull off. The cigarette animation, which lets your character smoke while doing basically anything, is a small touch that somehow encapsulates the whole vibe.

The cave section, unfortunately, undermines the visual work. Beyond the lighting bug, the environment itself is less interesting than what comes before it, and the drop in visual quality feels like a different team worked on it.

How it compares

Verdict

RV There Yet? is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and mostly succeeds at being it. The first half is fun, funny, and worth the asking price on its own. The second half is where Nuggets Entertainment's debut status shows most clearly. Enemy design that relies on item checks rather than skill, a cave section that's both a pacing problem and a technical one, and physics puzzles that feel like placeholders rather than finished content.

The winch system in action

For a group of friends looking for something cheap to play on a Friday night, this absolutely delivers. Solo players will find it hollow. The 80% critic recommendation rate reflects a game that works in its intended context. Just know that context has limits, and a few of those limits will make you want to close the game entirely.