Over the Hill review: "The single most stressful game I’ve played in years and I think it hates me"

The trailer for Over the Hill makes it look like you’ll be taking an off-road vehicle out into the wilderness and having a wonderful, relaxing time in warm sunshine, listening to acoustic guitar music as you trundle around paradise looking at the wildlife. Balderdash. It’s the single most stressful game I’ve played in years and I think it hates me.

It’s a bold move for a game to focus on the actual worst bits of open world driving games like Forza Horizon or even GTA. You know, the ones where you try to drive up a hill and it’s just a little too steep for your car to manage. Sliding around, skidding back down, and getting stuck against trees is the core experience at first, as there's just not enough grip to enjoy yourself. You can soon upgrade your tires, at which point things improve. But even with this added grip, Over the Hill is best described as a constant, laborious battle against hostile terrain – and that's far from enjoyable.

Said terrain at least looks reasonably nice. The art style is noticeably similar to developer Funselektor’s sublime Art of Rally. Not entirely flat-shaded, but certainly channeling that look. This can make more sparse areas like the Algerian desert look basic at times. The game uses lighting, fogging, and weather effects alongside a diegetic soundtrack to create its moods, but any sense of wonder quickly wears thin. There's so little to discover, it's frankly boring, a feeling compounded by the fact you're limited to moving at an absolute crawl. Even at full speed, you could probably run faster, if only you could exit the car.

Trails and tribulations

The game's best feature is the winch, which can latch onto trees with a quick press of the Y button on an Xbox pad. You then reel it back in, pulling yourself out of mud/water/rocks/trouble/the-clutches-of-despair in the process. It works really well and one item even lets you make an anchor point almost anywhere you like. That can feel like cheating, but sometimes there's no alternative. You soon acquire other limited use items too, like planks of wood to bridge small gaps and, later, a jack to reset you if you roll over. It doesn’t physically leverage your car’s chassis, instead respawning you, which really does feel like cheating when everything else is so hands-off.

While you can technically go anywhere, most steep hills are impassable, causing you to seek out the flattest routes, at which point you discover the world is actually quite linear. That at least means routes have been curated to offer a decent challenge, with jutting stones and slippery, bare rock faces clearly placed to test you.

Some such routes are turned into 'trails', which are the most videogamey and enjoyable part of the proceedings as you try to make it to GTA-esque checkpoint circles that appear at shortish intervals along a challenging track. Some of them are brilliantly designed – the Bridal Veil in the second Canadian area is a standout, passing a beautiful waterfall, which I was lucky enough to discover while the virtual sun was out. Gorgeous.

Sunshine is pretty rare, though. Storms are frequent and sway every tree on the screen in spectacular fashion. Inching forward through the surprisingly hostile elements in turn disperses the map's fog of war, revealing question mark 'points of interest'. These might be crates with personalization mods for your car, vehicles to tow back to your camp, or gates which denote the start point of those standout trails. Clearing every point in one area removes that map's fog of war completely, though you won't need the map by then. There's no rush or even instruction to complete anything; you can take your time.

The physics are OK, but not quite as convincing as other, more realistic-looking off-roaders. Your truck's movement is questionable at extreme angles and deformable terrain like mud or snow always deforms to the same level. It doesn’t build up again under reversing, nor squish outwards like it does in Snowrunner, either. It’s just there until it's flattened. Nonetheless, it does look pretty nice when you’re slewing around in a swamp or window-deep in snow and your wheels are leaving great troughs in your wake.

Off Road Pokedex

There’s an instant camera so you can snap the local fauna, which is a lovely feature but rarely used. You won’t see as much wildlife as you might expect, but that just makes the occasional sighting of an eagle that much more special.

There are a few mechanics (actual mechanics, the kind that use spanners) here and there with a few dialogue boxes to their names who will sell you upgrade items, but for the most part it’s a decidedly isolated solo experience. You can change songs on the tape player in your car, either track by track or different albums, but the best match is the laid-back acoustic guitar fare, which sounds a lot like pixel art fishing game Cast ’n’ Chill.

If aching isolation sounds like your idea of hell, you can play with other people, winching each other out of trouble and pulling up larger meteorites together. However, Funselektor has made it clear that the game was first designed as a solo experience and online performance is still being worked on. The game runs well even on Steam Deck despite some pretty vast draw distances, and visible LOD redraw is kept impressively scarce.

There is something to be said for setting off into the night as rain hammers down on the metal roof of your vehicle, your headlights swaying and dipping as you carefully navigate the undulating terrain. The same goes for those old-school 'Top Gear' moments of clinging to a mountainside with a 200ft drop to your right. But when you realise you're in your umpteenth hour of watching a small, low-detail car crawl slowly over barren sand dunes or trundle through another desolate valley, you'll likely long for something to happen.

Your journey isn't over yet. Check out our best open world games ranking for more worlds to get lost in!