Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is a slick ski ’em up, if its demo is any indication

One of the most important lessons in skiing is, presumably, to look where you’re going. You wouldn’t want to ski with your eyes closed or while viewing yourself from a drone pointed back at the mountain from above. That’d be daft.

Or maybe not. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the frosty followup to the mountain biking original, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and like its predecessor it’s about going fast while barely able to see what’s coming. Yet also like its predecessor, initial frustrations melted away until I was eagerly hitting the slopes in the Snow Riders demo for just one more quick go.

At first, I kept coming back because those brief moments between deadly collisions felt so good. It’s easy to rebuild momentum from a standing start, and there’s an easy grace available in the way gravity pulls you through the snow. The checkpoints are generous, too, so there was no real penalty when I hit the same rock ten or fifteen times.

It didn’t take long before I was invested in improving, however. Where in most racing games shaving seconds off a track time means making tiny tweaks to your racing line, in Snow Riders it can mean finding a shortcut or an entirely different route. It feels both more achievable and more rewarding than in a motorised equivalent. Each journey down a slope leaves a carving in the snow as an indicator of where you’ve been before, and even when it didn’t result in a quicker time, I still found it fun to seek fresh powder and to push towards a steeper decline or a riskier ramp.

In the two routes available in the demo so far, there are optional challenges to complete which cajole you towards aiming for mastery rather than mere completion. I checked them all off and I’m eager for more. Once Steam Next Fest kicks off proper later today on October 14th, the demo will further open up to enable this spiritual successor’s big new feature, 2-8 person multiplayer, which seems like it could be a hoot. Although I admit I’m even more interested in the “zen mode”, which strips away the challenge and limits altogether in favour of a free roam exploration of the mountain. If it can replicate those SSX3 dreams of slippy sliding for 30 minutes at a time, I’ll be in heaven.

If any of that appeals, you can join me on the demo slopes over on Steam.