Lonely Mountains: Downhill

Genre: Isometric Bike Racing

Players: 1

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Review:

Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a challenging Bike Racing game with an isometric overhead view originally released on multiple platforms in 2019, this game was ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2020. However, this game doesn’t play like most racing games – in Lonely Mountains: Downhill, players are fighting the treacherous terrain every bit as much as the clock.

In terms of presentation, this game is quite striking. Its biker, wildlife, and environments are depicted with a distinctive low-poly angular design, although don’t take that to mean they’re sparse and simple – the areas you’ll be biking through are surprisingly lush and varied, not just distinct from each other, but with memorable unique areas within each of the four trails snaking down the game’s four very different mountains. In fact, despite the technically-simple environments, I found myself actually impressed with the beauty of the scenery in this game, with some really stunning vistas, and gorgeous natural structures that form your surroundings. The second of the four mountains in particular was quite beautiful, with serene rivers feeding into roaring waterfalls surrounded by trees bathed in autumn reds, browns, and greens. And more expert players will be able to unlock a “night mode” for each map that not only makes for a greater challenge, but also shows off some impressive lighting and shadows.

However, I can’t let the game off the hook for its technical faults. While the low-poly presentation can be pegged as a stylistic choice, the pop-in I frequently noticed certainly isn’t, and regardless of whether or not the blur of objects too close or far from the camera was intentional, I found it to be far too pronounced, to the point where it interfered with the gameplay by obscuring the path I would need to ride as well as its obstacles. However, more than all of these flaws I was frustrated the most by the game’s framerates, which are decent enough at the start but over the course of playing the game gradually dropped, even freezing the screen briefly at key points during gameplay. This was the most pronounced the first time I played one of the aforementioned “night mode” maps, which had framerates that kept getting worse and worse, to the point where the game was a near-unplayable slide show by the time I reached the goal at the bottom.

The sound design in this game is also pretty striking, making the choice to go with no music and to have your soundtrack simply be the sounds of nature around you, as well as the noises your bike makes, and the occasional grunt or short scream when you crash. It’s a choice that works well for the game, really driving home the natural beauty of the environment around you and giving it a great visceral feel that further helps to differentiate each area as you travel through it.

When it comes to the gameplay itself, players have their choice of two simple control schemes, one where the direction you press is relative to the camera, and one where it’s relative to the direction the bike is facing (I find I prefer the latter), with “go”, “brake”, and a brief “high speed” button that uses an auto-refilling meter, and that’s it. The camera itself sticks to an overhead isometric view that dynamically shifts its angle slightly as players traverse the terrain, and this works okay, though I found myself strongly wanting at least the option to shift the camera to an over-the-shoulder view – I know this would be an entirely different sort of game if you could do that, but that didn’t stop me wanting it.

One of the smartest things this game does is to split its challenges into two main types – on the one hand, players can try to get to the bottom of their trail as swiftly as possible, regardless of how many crashes they suffer on the way. On the other hand, they can try to complete a trail with as few crashes as possible, taking their time to avoid anything resembling danger. These two types of goals make for very different kinds of gameplay that give the game some good variety.

The main idea of the gameplay is that as players navigate their bike down the twisting trail, the trail itself being the greatest challenge, as your bike rider will crash easily and often. Anything more than the slightest bump will send your rider flying and toss the player back to the last checkpoint, and players looking to take shortcuts through steeper areas will find that at times it doesn’t even take a bump – sometimes the game will just decide it doesn’t like what you’re doing and send you into the “crash” state without any sort of collision. It can be a frustrating and finicky matter of trial and error to feel out exactly what the game does and doesn’t allow, and players wanting to find shortcuts will find themselves testing the limits of this facet of the game.

Speaking of shortcuts, let’s address the game’s off-road freedom and its limitations. All of the trails players traverse will allow players to take their bike anywhere they want, so long as they don’t crash. In that respect, this is a game that will naturally appeal to speed runners whose goal is to find every angle and exploit to shave seconds off of their time. Unfortunately, this game entices players to explore, but then punishes them heavily for doing so – every course is marked with multiple checkpoints, and skipping even one of these checkpoints will result in you being unable to complete the race. The game doesn’t signal to the player where these checkpoints are, either, nor is it always clear which path is the path the game expects the players to take, meaning there are times when players have genuine reason to worry that they’re riding off in a direction they shouldn’t go.

In more expert difficulties, the checkpoints are removed entirely, which one would think removes this problem, but the lack of checkpoints means that a single crash will send the player all the way back to the start of the trail, meaning that even now that risky shortcuts are an actual option, they’re not an option you’re likely to want to take unless you’re close to the beginning of that trail, lest you lose all the progress you’ve made so far.

One of my great joys in this game was to manage to succeed in going off the beaten path and finding a great shortcut that managed to land me on one of the mountain’s other trails, which gave me this great feeling of how everything here flows together beautifully… only to have my joy dashed shortly later when the paths converged and I reached a checkpoint only to discover the game’s equivalent of waggling its finger at me and telling me to go back and start over. So much for the freedom of blazing your own trail, I guess.

As a result of this, Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a game with some amazing good qualities that feels like it has great potential to be more, but at every turn it chooses to shackle the player instead of giving them the freedom this game entices you with. The game’s lovely aesthetic really does help to give players a feeling of simulated natural beauty, and this can be an enjoyable experience when the open-natured freedom of that beauty is reflected in the go-anywhere nature of the gameplay, too often the game fights against the player in this regard. Wanting to enjoy this virtual wilderness with a camera that puts you in the action? No, you’ll use our camera and that’s that. Wanting to seek out the best shortcuts on the mountain? No, you’ll stick to the shortcuts we deem acceptable, which aren’t clearly marked. In the end, this is still a good challenging and unique racing game, but it’s one that misses so many opportunities to be something more than it is.

tl;dr – Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a difficult Bike Racing game with a fixed isometric viewpoint that challenges players to race down treacherous terrain without crashing. This game has a great aesthetic that really makes these off-road areas quite beautiful in their simplicity, and there’s some good open-ended gameplay here, but far too often the game shackles the player to doing what it wants the player to do rather than freeing them to blaze their own trail. The result is a game that’s still fun, but frustrating because it could have been much better.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Winner:

Best Driving/Racing Game – Many of the best racing games on the Nintendo Switch in 2020 were ports of older racing games that, while still excellent, didn’t bring anything new to the table (and as such are not listed here). Lonely Mountains: Downhill, on the other hand, brought an atmospheric experience that transformed the Racing game genre into not only a test of skill, but a puzzle of sorts to test players to see not only how quickly they can descend the game’s challenging mountains, but also whether they can do so without crashing. Of all of the new racing experiences on the Nintendo Switch this year, I feel like this one was the most memorable.

Best Sound Design – It takes a lot of confidence in your sound design to refrain from putting any music at all in your game, but Lonely Mountains: Downhill is right to be proud of its sounds, which are a huge part of this game’s experience. Despite the game’s stylized polygonal look, speeding through the natural environments really gives you the authentic feeling of bicycling through these environments thanks to the way the sounds of everything around you paint the picture in your head as you go. The result is a truly immersive experience that elevates the game in a way that wouldn’t be possible without this game’s fantastic sound design.

Runner-Up: Best Graphical Style

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