Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders Review

The makers of my favorite extreme downhill biking game, Descenders, have made an extreme snowboarding game, and now the makers of my second favorite extreme downhill game, Lonely Mountain: Downhill, have made an extreme skiing game. I won’t pretend to be surprised by this: all these sports are good because they are brisk and threatening, especially on edged slopes.

The problem, in my opinion, is that bikes are better than the other two and there are far too few mountain biking games. I love bikes. I love the serene locking of their gears and wheels. I love the distinct subtleties of the dynamics that come from pedaling. During the first few hours spent in Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, I really regretted not playing Lonely Mountains: Downhill. Skis are clumsier than bikes. They don’t accelerate as brisk as a bicycle. But gradually I learned the orthodox rules of skiing brisk down technical hills, and as I figured out how to go faster and faster, Snow Riders started to click into place wonderfully, to the point where I now think I love skis more than bikes.

First, I learned that in order to gain speed quickly, I had to first slide down without crouching, and then hunker down firm to become a human ball. The next lesson was one that the loading screens constantly reminded me of, but I learned slowly: braking is crucial. On a bicycle, brakes sluggish the bike down, and at very high speeds this is more likely to result in inaccuracy, if not death. It’s similar with skiing, but with proper knowledge and good reflexes I can usually maintain speed while negotiating more challenging turns and bowling.

There are many more subtleties to learn, such as the advantages of skiing backwards and the finer details of the trick system, but my point is that I finally loved skiing. And you don’t need to learn all the subtleties of Snowriding and have fun doing it: you can completely ignore the tricks and still get caught up in setting increasingly faster times on each slope.

Like its predecessor, each of Snow Riders’ 12 hand-crafted point-to-point tracks is viewed from the perspective of a fixed camera. Sometimes the camera hangs behind my skier, sometimes it takes an isometric view, and often it hovers absurdly in front. This gives the Lonely Mountains games a dreamy, cinematic feel, but it also highlights that these “zen” games have little to do with realism. Snow Riders doesn’t try to be a skiing simulator. Instead, it focuses on evoking the myriad conflicting moods associated with high-risk, high-reward activities. I would describe Snow Riders as a cozy, reflex-oriented game with plenty of failure.

I realize there’s a category error here: if there’s one thing that “cozy” games seem to have in common, it’s that they usually forgo death or any other conventional video game punishment. In Snow Riders, just like in Downhill, you will probably die every 30 seconds. In the campaign, it is necessary to complete courses without dying or within a certain time to unlock further paths and thus progress. It will usually take countless tries before I can nail the plate to the tooth. This is obviously a lot of pressure, but it can be alleviated in two ways.

The first is to avoid pressure altogether. There’s a “zen” mode that allows me to just play around with any song I like, even if I haven’t unlocked it in the campaign. In zen mode I can also place checkpoints anywhere on the map, which not only eliminates the frustration of repeating challenging sections, but also allows me to focus on the primal joy of rushing down a hill without dying and clever wayfinding that occupy my mind. The latter is crucial in a campaign because, like Downhill, there are usually multiple ways to tackle any given corner or drop, and finding the most comfortable route I can take is one of the things I love most about this series.

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The second “cozy” aspect is simply the atmosphere. As many have noted about Downhill, Snow Riders is just a wonderfully atmospheric game. Instead of music, we hear the gentle wind of ethereally deadly cliffs; instead of V8 engines, you hear the buzzing sound of sliding blades and tearing snow. The landscapes in Snow Riders convey a sense of amplified reality that’s both feasible and questionable: sometimes the seemingly realistic tracks narrow into wonderfully surreal spirals or twist into two-story bridges that strangely thatch across an otherwise overly uneven space. These lapses in realism are all the more effective because of their rarity, and they usually occur without any build-up or warning.

If I were to draw a comparison, it would be with the eminent free-gliding sequence in Journey or, more obscurely, with Superlot. The lack of music is crucial: it is a clear interpretation of what is happening dangerously below power you really feel, filled with the blissful certainty that you will never break a bone or suffer brain damage. Equally crucial is that Snow Riders doesn’t try to upset me when I fail or over-praise me when I succeed. When I die, the game doesn’t make a fuss about it. When I do something brilliant, my genius goes unnoticed.

But don’t get me wrong: Lonely Mountains is also an incredibly demanding racing game that tests your dexterity for those looking for a challenge, and this sequel puts extra emphasis on that with online competitive modes. There’s a real-time racing mode for up to eight players – no ghosts here, you can crash into your opponents – as well as a co-op mode that gives your team six manually placed checkpoints and aims to score as many points without dying as possible , with all points accumulated at checkpoints. Racing is like the base game, only with other players and end-game stats screens full of bragging rights. I find myself coming back to it again and again, although the co-op mode seems a little at odds with the uncomplicated, uncomplicated rest of the game.

Snow Riders’ success lies in the diminutive details: the sluggish realization that flat ice surfaces can be a assist rather than a hindrance, a gradual, hard-won understanding of momentum through the air, and the fact that each “death” vacates all previous ski runs on snow, making it easier to chart adventure routes.

Amidst all this learning and all the quick decisions necessary for a successful ride lies the secret ingredient of Snow Riders: silence. There’s no effort to compensate for the awkward aural composed of skiing, no rising strings or deafening breakbeats. Snow Riders delights in the sublime buzz of skis against the backdrop of impossible mountains. It’s pretty, scary, sometimes exhausting, but never loses its cold. This is the type of game I’ll probably play for half an hour every month for the rest of my life.