The fantastic throwback arcade racer Slipstream, which is heavily inspired by OutRun, will be getting a native PS5 upgrade and a free expansion across all systems to celebrate its fifth anniversary. The new content is named Blue Hour, and will include two game modes, three cars, and five courses for all existing owners at no extra cost. It’s due out this summer.

“The blue hour is a brief period of the day, after the sunset but before the night, when the sky takes on a deep blue tone,” explained developer Sandro de Paula. “It's long been appreciated by painters and photographers because of the beautiful and unique properties of light during this time. The fading light from the sun illuminates everything softly, and the deep blue sky creates a great contrast with the usually yellow-ish urban lamps. It's a moment of natural beauty that happens every day. And as times of the day have always been a theme in Slipstream, in this expansion I joined forces with Effoharkay and took the opportunity to explore it a little more.”

Specifically, the new tracks have all been inspired by real-life locations: Marseille, Pompeii, Transylvania, Granada, and Edinburgh. One-man developer de Paula learned a lot from the core release, and has implemented some new graphical techniques for these additional courses, including fog and dynamic lighting. The end-result is a release that looks closer to a 32-bit title, as opposed to the originally intended 16-bit style.

The press release adds: “On the music side, Effoharkay's goal was to maintain some consistency of the same synthy vapor OST but without relying on synth sounding instruments. Most of the songs were inspired by the eccentric electric club-ish racing tunes of Ridge Racer 4, Need for Speed, and WipEout. He wanted it to be pulsing and driving and diverse, while not worrying about pristine production quality or structure.”

All in all, this sounds like a great free update – and considering the title can be purchased fairly cheaply, well worth checking out if you haven’t already. Just in case you missed it, we were pretty complimentary in our Slipstream PS4 review, so give that a looksie if you’re eager to learn more.

[source youtube.com]