Lonely Mountains: Downhill (Xbox One)

Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a game about reverse bike hikes. Rather than winding your way up a mountain path, this mountain biking game has you forging your own path through nature to find the campsite at the mountain’s base. You aren’t performing tricks along the way or racing other bikers, it’s just you versus the mountain in a battle that can be oddly serene even when the timer is ticking in a challenge.

 

Lonely Mountains: Downhill takes place across four mountains with four bike paths each. The game begins with most everything locked save the first trail on the first mountain, and when you choose to play it, you’ll find yourself at the peak with nowhere to go but down. Uniquely, your first experience on a mountain has no true external pressures bearing down on you. You are free to move as you please, taking your bike down the mountainside at whatever pace you prefer. A lack of music immerses you in the natural atmosphere of the experience even though the low-poly look certainly prevents it from feeling realistic, but the art style actually benefits the gameplay immensely. Your path down the mountain is a dangerous one not because of anything out to get you, but because the natural shape of the world has many perils. Fallen logs, jumps to clear, water you might fall into, and rocks and trees to crash into all work as understandable barriers to punish recklessness, but because every rock has such clearly defined surfaces, you can use the shape of the mountain to your advantage.

Rather than just following the intended trail, you are encouraged to break away and search for your own way down the mountain. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can skip an entire winding path by riding down a dirt slope. A canyon might take a long time to traverse if you stay inside it, but leaping between rocks with the right amount of speed will let you breeze past it. Many areas have multiple shortcuts or alternate routes that reward an adventurous spirit with a faster path to your destination, but you’ll definitely need some degree of skill to take these more exciting alternatives. You don’t have much control over your bike once it has left the ground. Managing its speed and turning on land is responsive enough, but if you’re looking to clear gaps or do dangerous drops you’ll need to make sure your bike won’t flip or tilt too much before it hits the dirt again. It can definitely be hard to gauge what the game considers deadly, the distance you can safely drop and the speed with which you can safely hit an object never being all too clear even after multiple unfortunate ends. There are checkpoints on the mountain that will spawn you back in without penalty so long as you hit them on your way down, but they’re deliberately spaced to make sure you’re always somewhat cautious even as you grow more familiar with the layout of the trails.

 

Once you’ve finished your first trip down a new trail, you’ve likely had a few spills, learned the lay of the land, and spotted potential shortcuts or areas where the level geometry can allow for some interesting approaches to traveling down the mountain. The degree of freedom given in this initial experience definitely benefits what comes next, because to unlock other mountains and trails, you’ll need to do special challenges that require a good understanding of the mountain to complete successfully. Essentially, you’ve done the training run, now you need to put what you found into practice, and while it’s still likely you’ll make mistakes since your knowledge is hardly intimate, you do know what parts will be rough, where you found nice time saves, and have identified areas you could exploit if you had a good reason to do so. This is where the designs of the mountains really shine, as you now must find the best path, a path you decided on because of the openness inherent to each trail’s layout. None of them have just one way forward and some even seem to have unintentional paths you can take besides the ones the developers clearly laid out. For example, one area in one of the canyon trails I was able to take a low road where the bike and rocks struggled with collision detection a little, the developers likely thinking anyone down in the area would have already died but I was able to shave time off my ride by successfully finding a safe way onto those rocks.

There are plenty of ways to use the world design in your favor that aren’t glitchy of course, and those are what will be necessary to meet the conditions set by the trail challenges. Unlocking new areas is usually tied to either a speed challenge or the goal of getting to the bottom within only a certain amount of crashes, and considering these usually number in the twenties, you can get a fairly good idea of the base level of difficulty experienced when traversing these mountain paths. Things are helped by the checkpoint system, a death resetting your timer to when you last hit a checkpoint and the game not counting any deaths before you hit the first one since otherwise you’d just reset the course over and over to clear them away. These two challenge types are pretty much diametrically opposed in how you approach them, one focused on speed and the other on caution, and it might be wise to do one and then the other rather than trying to combine them. However, what you learned from your first bike ride on the trail will help you with both challenges, the mental map built and the player already having a good idea where helpful routes could exist even if they didn’t take them before.

 

Lonely Mountains: Downhill will definitely frustrate some players because of how easy it is to fall off your bike and the inevitably of failure as you need to learn the mountain, but when things do come together and you clear a challenge, it is intensely satisfying because of how personalized the means of doing so is. There are plenty of routes down the mountain, many that couldn’t complete the job, but it was your custom route through the course that won the day. Your freedom is what makes the payoff so sweet, and even when you have to race through rapids, a sandstorm, or a marsh, you’ve already had the experience needed to get through it back during that first exploratory run.

 

There is more to do beyond the unlocking challenges as well if the gameplay style really catches your fancy. If you really want to test your ability to find the best routes down the mountains, additional challenges can be completed to get new bikes and outfits for your faceless rider. The bikes do have some influence on how you ride, but it’s certainly no substitute for what you’ve learned through experimentation. That detail is key since it could be quite aggravating to think your failures would be rectified by the right equipment, but Lonely Mountains: Downhill is certainly about mastering the environment, and to that end, there are even things to find out in the trail like resting spots. There isn’t anything unusual to find or collect though, the game maintaining that lonely air both as a good way of making feel like all you do is much more personal and as a way of letting its simple environments have a quiet beauty despite the self-imposed graphical limitations.

THE VERDICT: The structure of Lonely Mountains: Downhill really complements the goals of its gameplay. By having you experience every mountain trail first in a mode focused on freely feeling your way down the mountainside, you develop the skills and know-how to tackle the game’s more clearly defined challenges. The low-poly mountains are an excellent fit, their varied designs packed with many paths to take and shortcuts to uncover yourself, the satisfaction of completing a challenge coming from that self-guided learning period. The small failures can be surprisingly frequent though as you have trouble learning the line between safe shortcuts and deadly drops, but the potential frustrations are balanced out by the rewarding feeling of conquering a mountain by way of your personally developed route.

 

And so, I give Lonely Mountains: Downhill for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. The amount of player agency featured in Lonely Mountains: Downhill is exhilarating. That initial exploration of a mountain trail could have been too aimless or bland without the right motivations, but not only do the physics of the game make that traversal already fairly challenging to do safely at all, but the practice done in the low pressure version of the course transfers wonderfully to taking on the challenges with stakes. The fact that failures are so frequent is a necessary evil, because without that degree of difficulty and the proper limitations imposed on you, there would be little excitement in finding an effective shortcut or using the mountain’s geometry to gain an edge. It definitely could do with some clarity on what could be lethal, perhaps something like a small effect around the bike’s tires that subtly indicates when you’ve hit a dangerous speed or when you’ve fallen too far and will die when you next touch the ground. There is a subtle realism to the game despite its graphical style that would have to be accounted for, but the strange beauty and serene experience wouldn’t be jeopardized by a little more feedback, and there are always options like controller rumble that wouldn’t interfere with the idea of one simple biker trying to conquer a treacherous mountain path on their own.

 

The mountains of Lonely Mountains: Downhill are definitely the stars of the show. The variation between them is surprisingly good considering they’re all meant to look natural and hardly show the footprint of human influence, but what they really bring to the table is their openness. They can be aggravating at times, but by encouraging the player to find their own preferred path from so many possibilities, the mountain layouts create a biking game where thrilling stunts and high speeds aren’t necessary to make play satisfying.