Steam Next Fest is back with literally thousands of sweet 'n' short demos, including an extreme sports sequel that'll kick your butt and declog your brain within minutes.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill easily became my favorite sports game of all time - and one of the best sports games around no matter who you asked - when it came out five years ago. Your blocky biker's only purpose was to speedrun down massive mountains, swerving through tree lines, drifting around massive rocks, finding shortcuts, and shaving precious seconds off your run. Its sequel Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is now replacing the bikes with skis, swapping the zen forests with serene wintery mountainsides, and has an equally moreish Steam demo that pulled me in for "one more game" about six times.
What stands out from the get-go is just how brilliantly Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders can recapture its predecessor's same thrills. You're still making nail-biting last-second turns, all while scouting around the screen for potentially hidden routes or a jump that's just about possible to land - even if the developers didn't intend for it to be - in an effort to reach a new record time.
Mountains feel even more grand this time, though. Maybe it's the way the glossy snow will stretch and blanket the trail way into the distance. Maybe it's the fact that the routes are even more winding and twisted this time around. There's sometimes not even a clear, 'intended' path forward. Thankfully, the checkpoint system is back so this is still a game about learning and repeated improvement. You'll bash your brains against a rock and then respawn from a checkpoint a couple of seconds back, so you're never discouraged from experimenting.
The snowscapes also help with this experimentation. Once you respawn, your old tracks are still embedded into the thick snow, meaning you can retrace your steps (skid marks?) until you diverge or crack your kneecaps once again. And that's a tactic that gets even more dangerous in Snow Rider's new 2-8-player multiplayer mode that has you racing to reach the finish line. Sure, you can follow whoever's in front of you or their own tracks in the snow, but that might lead you off a cliff or face-first into a tree.
I was initially a little mixed on the race mode because the checkpoint system usually means you're nowhere near other players, or you're at best just passing by them. But then I realized the multiplayer simply massages what Lonely Mountains has always been about: speedrunning. Following other's tracks has the same effect as Dark Souls messages - it's a guide, a golden trail, toward routes you would have never spotted yourself. It's all intended to make you a better rider and a faster speedrunner. Even when you cross that last gasp-inducing checkpoint, you can spectate what other riders are doing, from the mistakes they're making to the tricks they're trying to pull off. At its heart, Lonely Mountains is still a game about learning, zen and brutal in equal measure, and a new multiplayer mode only reinforces that.
There’s no shortage of upcoming indie games that you should definitely keep an eye on.
