
Slowly but surely, you start becoming more daring - cutting a corner here, taking a jump there. What would it take for you to land on that path without completely eating it? Once you’ve mastered the basic act of clearing a mountain, you can’t help but go back and discover how to shave time off your best run. But the fact that they’re there makes you curious, doesn’t it? Mountains have a dizzying number of trails and backroads to choose from, and the game never tells you that you need to take any of these paths. But unlike nearly every “masocore” game I’ve played, every challenge is self-inflicted. I can almost forget that I haven’t been outdoors much in about three months.īut this isn’t merely an agrestal fantasy - because you’re going to die, and you’re going to die a lot. Sometimes, I like to close my eyes and just soak it all in. And then of course there are all the natural sounds of traversing a mountain: a creek rushing downstream birds chirping cheerfully overhead cicadas buzzing under the fat summer heat. The whine of your suspension when the bike hits the ground, hard. It is, in some ways, a marvel of evocative sound design, but masterfully paired with the precision of the Switch’s HD rumble.

Now I can play the game in bed when I’m once again failing to fall asleep at 3 a.m., which is a huge boon at this particular point in time. But having it as a portable experience only makes it better. The game has always been good, of course, if not a master class in tight controls.

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Since then, the mountain biking simulator has become a part of the Xbox Game Pass - meaning you can download it for free if you have a subscription - and, more recently, it was released on Nintendo Switch. Lonely Mountains: Downhill was first released for major platforms in 2019, earning it a slot in Polygon’s best games of 2019 list. Remember outside? Lonely Mountains: Downhill is not only one of the best embodiments of the outdoors I’ve played during social isolation, it is also a terrific video game that nails the inherent crunchiness of biking in nature.
