Pizza. French Fries. Pizza. French Fries: Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders Solo Review
All images are from Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders by Megagon Industries
I played Lonely Mountains: Downhill during a particularly difficult time in my life.
We were deep in the pandemic, and through a toxic combination of inborn responsibility and colleagues contracting the plague (some were actually sick, most weren’t), I found myself working 80-100 hour weeks. In the meat grinder of my daily routine, it became necessary to find things I could “enjoy” in 30 minute bursts while on a lunch break or in that interval before sleep usually reserved for dreading doing it all again. “Enjoy” is in quotes because that schedule will drain all the good out of life regardless of what you’re doing. Of course, I was on a similar work schedule when Elden Ring released but that didn’t prevent me from consuming dangerous levels of caffeine in order to sneak in a minimum of four hours every night until I’d finished.
That’s another story for another time.
An Easy Allies podcast I was listening to while I sprayed chemicals that slowly dissolved the clothes off my body covered Lonely Mountains: Downhill. It sounded like it met my bite-sized gaming criteria, so I downloaded it from Game Pass later that night. Downhill is a mountain biking game about mastering simple controls, but complex physics, in order to tackle the obstacles directly in front of you (it shares a similar philosophy with the Trials series, but it’s tonally the opposite). True, the trails you ride are made up of checkpoint to checkpoint stages, but you’ll almost never be in a position to think of them that way. Success and failure often comes down to navigating one tricky turn, or surviving a three foot drop, or angling a wheel just right to avoid tumbling into a ravine. Every meter from the summit to your base camp is earned. It’s as difficult as it is rewarding.
A couple years removed from jumpsuits and face shields, it only seems fitting that I play its sequel, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, in a similarly rough stretch. There’s something cathartic about making gradual progress and this series offers the most peaceful form of frustration since Celeste (coincidentally, that’s also about conquering a mountain). Its free roam mode is named “Zen” for a reason.
Snow Riders replaces mountain biking with skiing but follows the same formula as its predecessor. After customizing your low poly character (which amounts to little more than selecting a beard color and which grunts of anguish most accurately reflects your specific brand of suffering) you’ll be taught how to jump, turn, speed up, slow down, and pivot. There’s no story here–unless you make your own. I named my avatar Peter. He’d ventured into the wilderness to find himself after an ugly breakup. I was ready to throw him off some cliffs.
Before getting into what I like, I felt it was best to give a dry breakdown of how progression works in Snow Riders (because the progression IS the game and will also be the primary deterrent for most people who pick it up). With how many numbers this breakdown involves, I decided the best way to present it was in an easy to understand list:
-Currently, Snow Riders has three mountains.
-Each of these mountains has four trails to ride and four more difficult variations of these trails (some share stretches of terrain, but this makes for a total of eight mostly unique paths).
-Once a mountain and slope are selected, you are locked in to that trail (think of them as tracks in a racing game–this is not the open world of SSX 3–though someone should make a new SSX).
-Each of these trails has three challenges to complete:
Get to the bottom within a time limit.
Get to the bottom within a certain number of crashes.
Get to the bottom within a more strict time limit AND under a certain number of crashes (though the crash limit is more lenient than objective number two).
-Finishing challenge number one will unlock the next trail while finishing challenge number three will provide access to the Black Slope of the trail you just completed. All objectives will grant experience and currency. As you level up, you’ll also gain access to new cosmetics (who doesn’t love a scarf or pair of pants) and, eventually, equipment. The equipment you unlock isn’t necessarily “better” but is meant to enhance your chosen playstyle (for instance, you might select a set of skis that are better at conserving your momentum across icy surfaces at the sacrifice of handling).
Still following?
While this tends to be true of the whole medium, if you want to see everything the game has to offer, you’ll need to be good at it. You are going to get stuck. You are going to watch promising attempts die (usually repeatedly). And unlike the twisting and winding courses, there are no shortcuts.
The experience of actually playing Snow Riders is equal parts exhilarating and scary. No game has ever captured that childlike feeling so well of cresting a hill on your bike or scooter and picking up sudden, violent speed. You know you should slow down, but you’re having too much fun. Your improvement (and number of crashes) is meticulously tracked for every checkpoint. If you’re the type of person who gets addicted to chipping seconds off your personal best in pursuit of perfection, this won’t just be a carrot on a stick for you–it’ll be the whole produce department.
It’s in the moments of split second decision making that Snow Riders is at its best. Do you take the safer path or cut through the trees? Should you attempt to leap across a canyon of jagged stones? You can only suffer one more fall–but your time is ticking down.
The camera is practically its own character here (it’s automated–not that you’d have the reflexes necessary to manipulate it manually if it was mapped to a stick). It’ll pull back as you pick up speed or cling to the shoulders of your parka for a more intense and claustrophobic experience. This takes some getting used to, but after your first few runs, you won’t want it any other way. The developers deserve a lot of credit for this. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it was to program and fine tune.
Other than some very mild camera clipping during awkward falls, I encountered no bugs over the course of my play time (progression is entirely based on skill, but I saw the majority of the content in six hours). Playing on a Series X the framerate never stuttered and the graphics, while simple, are gorgeous. I especially appreciated the color palettes the devs chose to work with–whether that be the navy blues of a frozen lake’s scarred surface or the turquoise of deep snow melting in shallow pools. Like Lonely Mountains: Downhill, there are hidden rest spots to admire the views and they might be my favorite “collectibles” ever (though I appreciated them less when I’d accidentally collide with one in the middle of a record breaking attempt).
Peter didn’t find himself on the mountain. Peter is dead.
I’ll end this review with the least helpful statement possible–this game will either click with you or it won’t. Like its predecessor, I played Snow Riders on Game Pass which is probably the perfect environment for it. If you’re even a little curious, download it, give it a few runs, and delete it before being buried beneath an avalanche of frustration. Just focus on the next challenge, the next line, the next step, the next breath. Admittedly, that’s not going to be for everyone, but it could be the thing YOU need right now.
87/100