I love the way you can learn to get the absolute most out of your bike, learning to conserve your rechargeable dash, and knowing when you've got enough weight behind you to stop peddling for a bit. I love the way there's no music to distract you from the soundtrack of the lonely biker, the burr of a distant woodpecker, the ticking of the bike chain. I love the way the low-poly art style perfectly captures something about the natural world, about its love of form, its scatterings and outcroppings. Ignore the stuff you're not interested in. Or wipe out as much as you fancy, the full-stop of collision bringing the wayward, dreamy sentences forming in your mind to a sudden conclusion. The title says it all: it's you, by yourself, biking a trail, getting from the top to the bottom as quickly and as safely as you can. There are achievements and all sorts of secrets to hunt for.īut still! At the heart of it is wilderness and a sense of absence.

And yes, you complete challenges and you unlock things - new bike parts, new trails, whole new mountains. There is an ideal kind of rickety momentum to the physics as you hurtle from the top of one slope all the way down to the bottom. There is a soaring artistry at work in the way the low-poly landscapes you race through are put together. Lonely Mountains is not built of nothing, of course.

Availability: October 23rd on PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox One.

Game downhill pc