Lonely Mountains: Downhill is one of my favorite games, a mountain biking sort of racer/ sort of Zen exploration of a virtual wilderness. Developer Megagon is making a sequel, where you trade your bike for skis. There’s a demo out now, and I love it.
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders has the same basic premise as Downhill: you start at the top of a mountain and need to get to the bottom. Instead of being a Spandex-clad little person on a little bike, now you’re a snowsuit-clad little person on little skis. The crux of a run is still about navigating a changing landscape, flying off jumps, taking tight turns, and exploring off the main path to try to find the optimal–or at least the most exciting–route down. Like the first game, there are challenges that unlock new trails, like finishing in a certain time or having under a certain number of crashes.
Both games are fairly simple to control, though Snow Riders adds some new features in the form of tricks you can pull off in the air, like grabs and spins. The full game will have a multiplayer mode, which I imagine skilled players will make look very fast and fancy but which I will use to crash into everyone and ruin their runs. I was impressed by how much Snow Riders keeps the vibe I love from Downhill, one of both stress and peaceful exploration, while the snow adds an excellent new element in the form of deep powder and the lovely way your little person sinks into a drift when you crash.
I crash a lot. Despite the hours and hours I’ve put into Downhill, I’m not the best player, never being able to stick to my plan in a high-stakes moment, or never quite being able to react fast enough to shave those precious seconds off my time or avoid calamity. I’m less into perfecting my runs in both games than I am chasing the thrill of exploring a new area for the first time. Both games situate their camera so a path is often full of surprises, zooming in or pulling out at just the right moment to give you a careful glimpse of what’s coming next while still keeping you on your toes. Even when I'm laser-focused on my goal, or when I've done a run dozens of times, I always feel like there’s some new path or detail to discover or smash into.
I love both games’ diorama-esque design, how they’re able to paint such evocative wildernesses with their blocky art style. The sound of the snow, like the whizz of your bike in Downhill, gives a calming vibe to what is often a high-speed game of brutal crashes and chaos.
The demo is part of yet another round of Steam demos that runs this week. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders has a release date of 2024, which I hope is true. I will also humbly suggest that Megagon could combine both games by adding fat bikes, which is 100% a crossover I would play.
Correction, 11:42am: The initial version of this article mis-stated that multiplayer was not available in the demo.
