Graham Smith
Few games place me so betwixt the yin and yang of frustration and flow state as Snow Riders. Here is a compact selection of ski slopes, each one yodeling the promise of my smooth and exhilarating descent over fresh powder. But wait, someone has littered this Ski Sunday with obstacles, forcing me to run a gauntlet of trees, rocks and rivers. I am thrust headlong into each of these obstacles a dozen times before my withered synapses and tired bones internalise these arboreal teachings and I make it safely to the bottom.
As in life, there is joy to be found in this journey precisely because it is hard. Unlike in life, the camera is often facing backwards while you do it.
Snow Riders contains 12 tracks split across three regions, with a blue and a black slope for each track. Each of these tracks and slopes must be unlocked one-by-one by completing courses, time trials, and crash-related challenges, but a capable player will have access to them all after a couple of hours. At this point you might think, “Is that it?”. Bury your head in a snowdrift immediately. Snow Riders’ macro-progression continues via level-ups, unlocked ski types (with different balances of speed versus steering versus falling-over-ness) and jaunty scarves. But its true longevity comes from the progression of your own mind and fingers.
For a start, each track is not really a track. You’re not doing three loops around Nürburgring, you’re picking your way cross country, and even within a chosen blue or black slope there are multiple routes. Sometimes that’s as simple a choice as whether you go left or right around a boulder, and sometimes that’s a choice of four distinct directions which take you across radically different terrain. One of them is probably a near-sheer decline and a Homer-on-a-skateboard leap across a canyon.
I found skiing came alive for me in a new way when I tried Zen mode, which removes timers and crash counters and lets you place your own checkpoints. This is not, as its name suggests, simply a chill way to play, but an invitation to more thoughtfully pick your way down the mountain, experimenting with new shortcuts and brake points. You then carry your new knowledge back into the regular modes.
Zen mode is great because it’s a way of absorbing the skier’s equivalent of The Knowledge with less frustration, but in general the game makes plenty of concessions to ease your burden. Each course is split into regular checkpoints, so a crash doesn’t send you back far. Resetting after a crash is almost instant, the wasted time wiped from your clock, and speed is easily regained. It also feels generous in the hands, with quick and easy braking and sharp turns a doddle.
Where I do feel frustration is where the challenge feels more arbitrary. Trees, rocks, rivers: these are a fair source of difficulty in a game about skiing down mountains. The camera not pointing in the direction of travel, as I alluded to above, feels less fair.
Snow Riders gives you no control over the camera whatsoever. It is at a fixed angle at all times, zoomed in pretty close, and at times as the route winds down and around, you will find yourself skiing at speed towards a future you can’t see. On second thoughts, maybe this is a lot like real life – but the fact remains that you will crash into an obstacle you had no way of seeing until you were upon it. This makes trial and error a necessity, and success a test of memory as much as reflex or coordination.
Perhaps this grants some affordances. Perhaps a front-facing camera would make traversal too easy, and as counterbalance the game would need less generous handling or trickier courses which in turn may prove more frustrating. I don’t know. The fixed camera angle is clearly a part of the design firmament, such that changing it would cause an avalanche of design issues, and so I don’t know that I’d advocate for its removal. All I know is that it feels more frustrating to crash into a tree I couldn’t see than hitting one I could.
For this reason, I’d recommend retaining as much of The Knowledge as you can before heading into multiplayer, one of Snow Riders’ new additions over its mountain biking predecessor, Lonely Mountains: Downhill. With up to 8 other players, you can race to the bottom of mountains in three-race Tours, and knowing of a shortcut – and being adept enough to take it and not crash – is essential if you want to win.
I did want to win, but I also found my heart increased three sizes with a surprising feeling of camaraderie during my hours spent racing others. Snow Riders is first and foremost about skiers attempting to overcome the mountain itself, and so, in spectating other players and watching them fall and fall and get up to try again, I began to cheer them on. My cheering mostly took the form of emojis, the only available in-game communication, but still I felt support in response when they blasted hearts and party poppers right back.
Alas, my heart shrunk by exactly one size again due to the multiplayer mode’s general jankiness. Several rounds left me trapped on the loading screen – a problem I also encountered in singleplayer when trying to use ghosts to compete against my prior performances – which forced me to alt-F4 from the game. I also experienced a troubling amount of lag, which was deadly when even a split second delay caused me to careen into a gorge.
There’s also, at this early stage of the game’s life cycle, a substantial skill gap between players. If you finish a course in a modest two and a half minutes, you might be thrilled to be in first place. You might be less thrilled to spend the next four minutes waiting for other riders to finish their own race before you can move on to the next. I saw many players simply quit rather than hang around, and if the host player departed then the whole game would freeze and judder as it chose another to fill the role. Riders also often fell like dominos, and I played many three-race tours that began with eight players but went unfinished when the final host quit and turfed me back onto the main menu. Perhaps the skill of the playerbase will flatten out over time, but I’d rather there was more to keep players occupied after they’ve crossed the finish line.
These are, I think, minor quibbles. The reality is that I’ve had a great time over the past week, learning routes and outpacing strangers. I also know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the kinds of times more adept players will achieve, and hardly touched the mid-air trick system at all. I will continue to hit the slopes for the fun of attaining that snowy flow state, even if only for brief moments before the tree of frustration clobbers me in the face again.
ranzware
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