The demo for SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding isn’t that new. It actually came out in September, but I’m filing it under the secret best unspoken RPS site category of “News (To Me)”, a whizcrack piece of web 3.0 technology that allows us to travel back in time and ‘announce’ things that don’t seem any less noteworthy for their advancing age.
If you think that’s a desperately cavalier and confusing way to run a news section, I can only suggest that you email a complaint to our news editor. Spoilers: our news editor is me, and I have already thrown your complaint in the bin. Mate, I don’t tell you how to do your job, but I’d be more than happy to, if you let me know what it is. Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yeah, skiiing!
SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding is a skiing sim for people who cherish their memories of SSX, Cool Boarders and, well, let’s say Santa’s Slippery Slope, even though they were terrible at those games at the time of release. Spoilers: those people are also me. As detailed by the Steam page, it’s a “minimalistic freeriding game” in which you “push your limits for the high score, or simply explore the endless, serene wilderness”. Currently, I am just trying to ski in a straight line. It’s probably easier on more powerful computers than my work laptop, which struggles to hit 30fps with anything three-dimensional.
Even at this prototypical stage, SNØ has gorgeous powder. It offers up endless rolling slopes of that particular species of untrodden snow that slices like cake frosting and flurries up behind you like excitable wildfowl. Magic snow. Not like the snow we get in the UK these days, which cuts like soup and appears magnetically drawn to the gap between your socks and your trousers.
There’s also a one-button “procedural” trick system, which feels context-sensitive, and “speedriding with a glider”, which terrifies me. I’ll settle for staying upright, thanks. A small example of the game’s chillout vibe: when you collide with a tree at bone-shattering velocity, the game makes a kind of poetical ambient “oof” sound and plays a chime at you as though to end a meditation session. I feel this element is open to ridicule, somewhat. I hit trees at such a frequency right now that the meditative chime has become a full-on town-crier handbell sequence. Just let me sleep in peace, facedown on all that lovely snø.
The full version of SNØ promises “unlimited riding” care of a mountain generator that offers up to 25 biomes, together with first-person and drone camera modes. The demo only lets you roam “a limited space” with just two biomes, birch and pine. It does have unlockable skins and a leaderboard, though, so if you weary of birch and pine forests, you could eke out the playtime by competing for high scores. Alternatively, you could play the surprisingly similar Infinite Pizza.