It’s officially the gaming high season. Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a new God of War, a new Nioh, and now a new Resident Evil. These come on the heels of instant classics like Cairn, Mewgenics, and Mio: Memories in Orbit. But rather than availing myself of these bona fide GOTY contenders, I’ve found myself pretending to be an alien who’s pretending to be a human who’s pretending to manage a gas station (and doing a really bad job).
Roadside Research, released Feb. 12 in early access for Windows PC and Xbox Series X, is technically a management sim, in the strictest sense of the term. You and up to three friends play as aliens masquerading as humans. (How do these aliens blend in? By taping intentionally horrible sketches of humans to their faces!) You operate a rural gas station in an effort to surreptitiously surveil human behavior, reporting what you find back to your homeworld. And yes, if the premise wasn’t proof enough, the low-poly graphics, finicky controls, goofy vibes, and emphasis on cooperative play put Roadside Research squarely in the “friendslop” genre.
I started playing Roadside Research almost by accident. A friend asked if I wanted to resume our intermittent playthrough of Black Ops 7’s co-op campaign. Obviously I was down (look, faults aside, the Black Ops 7 campaign rips in multiplayer) but said I’d deleted the Call of Duty app from my Xbox, and would have to download it from scratch. 200 GB. A few hours with my internet. Why don’t we check out this new Game Pass game in the meantime? It looks ridiculous! And I could download it in minutes.
So that’s how a friend and I started playing Roadside Research, a game whose controls resist you at every move and whose internal logic seems to follow no rules.
Roadside Research starts off the way many management sims do: You have to make money. To do that, you need to either sell gas station products, like sodas and boxed food, or sell gas. Both are harder than they sound. On Xbox, you can tab through one screen of the cash register with a controller’s thumbstick, while it’s only possible with the D-pad for other parts. Since you have to count out change to the penny, this poses a challenge. Meanwhile, operating the gas pump means taking money out of a customer’s hands, unhooking the gas line from the pump, putting the nozzle in the car, clicking the button for the grade of gas they want, holding the “pump gas” button until you land on just the right amount, and disconnecting the nozzle when you’re done. At any stage there, it is incredibly easy to just…do the wrong thing.
As you earn money, you can unlock more Stuff for your gas station: more items to put on your shelves, more shelves to put items on, more types of shelves to put different items on, and more types of items to put on those shelves. You eventually get tasked with more alien-like quests, like taking photographs of humans wearing specific clothing or hair styles. You’ll also be able to unlock alien technology to help, many of which is predicated on 20th-century extraterrestrial humor. (One of the high-level unlocks? An “auto probing toilet stall.”) But if you get caught using this tech too often, humans will get suspicious, summoning secret agents who show up and subject you to death or, worse, a minigame.
All the while, you have to juggle routine maintenance. Humans will toss trash all over the place, which must be picked up…piece by agonizing individual piece. Your shelves will eventually run out of stock, which means grabbing food from your storeroom and restocking it. You’ll eventually run out of spare food, which requires hopping on the (finicky) computer and ordering more. Customers will use your toilets, leaving behind iridescent clouds of green smoke; someone’s gotta clean that. And at random intervals, you’ll leave behind distinctly alien “goo” in your wake, which also needs cleaning, or else the agents will show up. At its most hectic, Roadside Research attains a similar level of frenetic coordination as games like Overcooked and Moving Out.
We eventually called it a night. I thought we played for about an hour or so.
When we logged in the next evening, data on our save file revealed the truth. We played for three and a half hours.
Such began a regular ritual (sorry, Black Ops 7). Over the past week, we’ve been experimenting with Roadside Research’s systems to try and establish any semblance of logical parameters.
For instance, you can manipulate prices of any product to generate additional profit, but if you get too egregious with it, the humans will get pissed, tanking your satisfaction rating. There is a comical lack of consistency here. Setting gas prices to a baseline of $7 a gallon? No one cares! (As of this writing, the average gas price in the United States is $2.98 per gallon.) Set the price of Diet Coke, or “Conk Light” in the game’s verbiage, to $7? Your shoppers won’t just skewer you in the Yelp reviews. They will assault your satisfaction rating with the incandescent fire of a thousand suns. They will threaten what you built with such ferocity you will beg them to just skin you alive and your body through the streets and be done with it. You do not, we learned, mess with the price of Diet Coke.
Regardless of Diet Coke prices, humans will still find other ways to flummox you. Roadside Research only allows you to place one type of food on a specific shelf. Once all of the food on the shelf is sold, you can then fill it up with a new type of food from your store room. At the start of the week, we filled three shelves with canned beans. For days now, one of those shelves has had literally just one can of beans left on it, but all of the humans keep buying beans from the other two shelves. The can just sits there, every day, taunting, haunting our dreams.
Also it turns out you don’t have to pick up their pieces of trash individually; you can buy trash bags that make collection easier and unlock trash cans that humans will automatically throw trash in. (Despite being relatively small objects, trash cans require an inordinate amount of floor space, and can’t be placed near any walls, shelves, or other objects in your gas station.) If these details existed in tutorials, we missed them.
We also discovered a few cosmetic options that seem intentionally geared to engender hijinks. For instance, you can name your gas station whatever you want, and that text will appear blazoned above your store’s front door. (Consult the image above to see what we landed on.) You can also draw whatever you want on your flimsy paper face mask disguises, with seemingly no filters or restrictions whatsoever. (FCC regulations prevent me from sharing those images.)
Roadside Research feels as if it’s held together with Scotch tape, yet it’s the most fun I’ve had with a video game this year. I am admittedly a bit late to the party on this, to letting myself get enamored by the wave of multiplayer games, like Lethal Company and REPO, that have flourished in the post-pandemic era. Just look at Peak’s ascendancy last year. Developed by a small team on a tight timeline, it went on to nab a Game Award nomination in a category stacked with some of the biggest games of 2025, like Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6. Sure, I stumbled into a revelation that might not be so revelatory to people who have been playing this style of game for years, but it’s one that struck me nevertheless: It’s not always about the game. It’s about who you play the game with.
