WYSIWIG skiing
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is pretty straightforward in what it’s trying to be. It’s a skiing game, based on physics and speed, focusing on racing against and with friends in a big, powdery world. If you close your eyes and imagine those words come to life, you’re probably pretty close to understanding this game.
With any kind of extreme outdoor sports game the controls are important, and thankfully Snow Riders feels really good to play. The main gist is that we can press a button to go, to do a little push-off, and then press A to duck and get speed. We can also hold that button down while we jump, affecting our distance and type of jump, like fanning out. But that’s just the motion side. There are a couple of options for general controls that we have, too, like being relative to the skier or relative to the screen. They’re meant to be angled towards what’s most comfortable for us, as they can affect how we view our skier. Being relative to the skier is a little more like tank controls, which I gravitated to.
It’s a little difficult to assess on the first few runs, because the controls have an important effect on our experience. When we first start playing, we’re not very good. We’ll crash, we’ll head off course, we’ll take turns to sharply or widely. It can be challenging — it was for me, initially. Even though I’m not great at the game, and crash a lot, it has a generous respawn with the press of the A button to launch us right back to the previous checkpoint. Luckily everyone else in the game is also feeling the challenge of the snowy trails, so landing in 6th out of 8 spots doesn’t feel too bad.
Once we get the hang of the controls, the game really opens up and its main vibe comes forward. It’s not just a racing game. Sure, there’s a time attack mode and we can get a few unlockable decorative pieces of gear, but the experience is all about the courses and getting to know them. There are multiple routes we can take throughout the ride, with different depths of snow and ice and cliffs and grades of ramp. We need to run these courses over and over to know them, and when we know them enough we can finally start taking our opponents in stride.
It very much has a “Trials” feel, in which we have to complete the course as fast as possible, albeit with the ability to stop and stare at the gorgeous scenery. It also feels like a terrific game when we’re hanging online with buddies, as even though its a skiing game it’s really about just moving, fast.
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders beckons us to look for random paths on a course. If we see something that looks like it may be a viable wa, it probably is, no matter how treacherous. We just go ahead and take it, and see where we land. Or crash. It’s not complex — it’s just snow, pure, and gravity. What you see is what you get.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for February 10, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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