HomeNewsSNØ: Ultimate Freeriding
If the demo for this magical Scandinavian skiing game is so “serene” then why do I die constantlyIs serenity only found in death?
Is serenity only found in death?
Image credit:Studio Gauntlet
Image credit:Studio Gauntlet
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!
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.
