Lately, every time I boot up my PC to play a game I end up playing Fresh Tracks, a fantasy skiing rhythm roguelike where you dodge obstacles, slash through bad guys, and take on bosses. The music rules. It’s stuffed with story and characters. The menus are full of lovely details and satisfying button presses. It has snow. I’m astonishingly bad at it, largely because I am wretched at rhythm games, but I’m loving it anyway.
You play as Skaii, who travels through the game’s snowy world to enlist various gods, called Mythics, to help them on their quest to defeat Mar, the god of terror, who has sucked the life out of the people of fantasy world Norwyn. The Mythics you enlist provide not just different abilities and new music tracks, but different narration that tells you more about Norwyn and its connection to music and adventure. It can be a lot to take in when you’re also focused on the rhythm game of it all, but repeated runs through levels gave me additional chances to pick up on what I missed, and there’s more lore to discover in the game’s menus.
Fresh Tracks is structured like a roguelike: you pick from a selection of songs as you go through a run, with their different difficulty levels charmingly stylized as the green circle, blue square, and black diamond of a ski slope. Each level will give you a randomized boon, like an extra jump or a damage buffer that stays with you through your run. You pick up currency called Whyspers as you travel, which can be spent on more buffs at merchant levels, as well as a permanent currency called Ekkos that you spend on practice tracks and new permanent equipment like skis. When you die, you start again without your temporary buffs and Whyspers, but you keep your Ekkos.
I only just beat the first boss last night, giving me access to a new Mythic who introduces new songs and a new, tougher version of their boss level. While you’ll hear the same songs multiple times, I found the difference between a medium and hard version of its level to feel like more than enough variety, especially when the songs cover so many different genres. I thought my favorites were the chill dance-pop numbers of my earlier runs (some of which, delightfully, feature lyrics that correspond to the moves you have to make on screen), but once I unlocked my first Mythic I started getting blazing death metal tracks that now I think are my favorites. There are 28 original songs, and I often find myself singing them when I’m not at my computer.
In the levels themselves, you dodge, duck, and jump over obstacles; lean through narrow gaps, and attack bad guys and deflect arrows with your sword. The early version of that sword, once its ability is fully filled through powerups and perfect timing, refills your health, but the new sword I earned for beating the first boss uses its ability to unleash a wave of fire. Levels can get busy; in harder levels, I found myself jumping and slashing together, or fending off enemies while frantically dodging obstacles, and on occasion I felt like I had to do way too many things at once. But this also makes each level feel like a real adventure and gives a sense of accomplishment when you overcome it, especially the much longer boss levels. Some levels throw weather into the mix; I keep returning to the practice area to play through song “The Blizzard” on repeat, the level of which features fog, water, and death metal.
The amount of story and special lingo–Whyspers, Ekkos, Mythics, and the like–can sometimes make things a little confusing. The game’s menu, for instance, is called the “Memory Palace;” when I was reading through the tutorials for where some more specialized difficulty options were, this lingo made me a little confused as to where to actually find the thing I was looking for. But not being taken out of the game’s world when I wanted to fiddle with v-sync or practice a song is a nice touch, even if it added an extra moment of “what was that again?” to my time. This might be very me praise, but the button prompts in the menus have a lovely weight to them that makes even the act of starting a run really satisfying.
My biggest complaint about Fresh Tracks is how wildly bad at it I am, something that has kept me from writing up the game even though I’ve had it for a while. There is something about my brain that just cannot comprehend rhythm games, despite the fact that I’m a lifelong musician who can passably play five instruments and wants to learn a bunch more. I never quite understand what I’m doing in them, how my button presses correspond to playing the song; I’m not playing the melody, or the percussion, and I frequently don’t understand how my actions relate to the beat I can hear and, via Fresh Tracks’ visual indicator, see. This is 100% a me problem, and something I bring up here despite my fear of being laughed off the gaming internet in hopes that one of you is a musician and/or rhythm game designer who will write a trenchant comment that will resolve my long-standing mental block slash existential crisis of “but what is a rhythm game?” so that I can enjoy this genre that I really should not find so baffling.
So maybe it’s high praise for Fresh Tracks that I’m playing it so much despite the fact that I sometimes pause it to go noodle on my mandolin to remind myself that, no, I do know what music is. It’s an absolutely charming game from top to bottom, packed with attention and detail, stuffed with story and clever touches. It’s Canadian studio Buffalo Buffalo’s first game, and I’m excited to see what else they do. Fresh Tracks is out now on Steam and PS5.
