Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders review

I first saw Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders in an Olexa video. I purchased it after watching just a couple minutes. Physics-based mechanics with slightly janky controls, but a lot of opportunity for skill expression? I knew I would love it, and I do.

When I say janky controls… When you press right on the joystick, the little guy tries their best, but it’s fighting against a lot. Gravity, how well it can push against the snow, how easily it can change its momentum. That right input was really just one of many opinions on which direction they should be going.

The geometry of the mountain is complex, riddled with bumps and tiny vallies to push you in unexpected directions. Flat and concave surfaces can help build a lot of speed, and they’re easier to turn on, too, while convex hills slow you down and you risk getting air time

It's really hard to see where I drew that picture that there's any difference at all where I hit this bump, but hitting it just right reduces air going into a downhill section.

There are rocks and trees, too. They can become quite difficult to dodge at times, partially due to the turning issue, but more since they might be coming from off-screen. The overhead camera does its best, but it doesn’t show quite enough. A lot of obstacles you just have to remember and respond to before they come on screen.

On the other hand, this kind of memorization is common in racing games. Whether a turn has to be tight or wide, whether I can carry speed into it, and things like that. The obstacles can make finding and executing optimal lines a bit more difficult, but it doesn’t seem any harder to remember.

What makes things a little hard to remember is that the maps are just so long. Plus, when you crash and reload from a checkpoint, you don’t keep your speed. That changes your line quite a bit. I would respawn from the checkpoint over and over again, perfecting one line only to find out that a different line works better when I have the speed. So, when I was going for a fast time on a mountain, despite there being a checkpoint system, I’d actually have to restart the whole level every time I crashed. 

Like I mentioned before, the geometry is complex and your lines have to be nuanced. If I was going to practice a line, it had to be from the start every time. And these lines are not easy to perform. The brakes work very well and they can get you out of a lot of trouble, but if you want to go fast you need to be willing to risk. And risking means making mistakes and starting over and over.

If I make this landing just right, it's safe, but if my angle was just a bit off then I crash. If I make the landing, but misjudge the turn, there's a rock I'll crash into over the hill. When I respawn from checkpoint, I cannot make the jump and have to take an entirely different rout.

At first I felt frustrated, but after I calmed myself down it became meditative. Though, perhaps a bit tense. If I made it through a difficult section really well, I might not be practiced in handling the next section at full speed. Again, the inability to restart from a checkpoint and keep the momentum you had can really test one’s patience. Sometimes the landing for a jump seems good but you die anyway. Sometimes I didn’t know about a tiny rock in the middle of the path, or sometimes a slight difference in the angle of the landing zone would lead to a crash. They can feel a bit random at times. But I find myself enjoying that process too much. Redoing the coarse from the start helps master the early turns, which will be very necessary when going for new records and the courses aren't too long.

At the time of this writing, I have the 141st fastest time, 59:67, for the first level, with 2 crashes. This is over ten seconds slower than the world record of 48:60. Crashes do slow you down by a lot, but the timer actually resets to when you passed the checkpoint so you can still have a good time. It’s only the loss of speed on respawn that hurts. Even the current world records for some courses have crashes. Getting a run without my crashes might save me a bit over three seconds according to my splits, but to beat the world record would still require probably discovering a new path, may a new shortcut.

There are different skis that in theory handle different terrain better or worse, so trying new skis might help in theory, but the Cheetah is the fastest and it dominates the leaderboards on most courses. I have a slight feeling that the only reason it doesn’t dominate ALL the courses is just because players haven’t figured out yet how to use it on them.

This course still is dominated by VIPER skiers, but even so an ambitious CHEETAH fan was able to get third despite having crashes.

I am enamored with this game. It is cute and charming, and it scratches an itch for having a skill that I can polish to perfection. I actually even bought this studio’s other game, Lonely Mountain: Downhill because I was so impressed with this one, but I honestly didn’t like it as much. Snow Riders improves not just in having more interesting mechanics, but also in structure. But as a sequel it lacks features that I would expect they should have thought about by now.

You can see all leaderboards on the main menu, but not when selecting a course, which is when I actually want to know. Ghosts also aren’t enabled by default. You have to earn the right to use them by beating the hard version of each course with certain conditions, and I like this because it encourages more exploratory play in the first few runs down a mountain. But after unlocking them they don’t enable automatically, and I’m not sure if I can enable them at all without going back to the main menu, selecting the course, and setting the ghost there.

You also can’t see the ghosts of other records and learn from their racing lines. Frankly, this is also important to prevent cheating. But as a smaller indie studio, I can’t really fault them for not wanting to rent out the server space to hold all those runs. I just wish they’d at least store the world record and allow you to download it.

But still, these imperfections only somehow make it feel more charming. This isn’t a hyper-competitive racing game like Trackmania, which I also play, it’s a game about a snow rider on a lonely mountain.