On Friday I met John and Kieron online for an evening of gaming.
We have a great many games that we have played through, and even a few we have completed, most notably Human Fall Flat multiple times (since they keep adding new levels, so we have to complete it again). We haven’t completed Borderlands 2, since sometimes the intensity of the shooting just means it feels too much effort. We have completed Overcooked 2 other than one level where we’ve only got two stars (and the score for three stars seems unreachable). We have completed Halos 3, ODST, Reach and 4, but haven’t really started 5 yet. We’ve started Moving Out 2, Star Wars Squadrons, Astroneer, Plate Up!, and Powerwash Simulator, among others. We regularly play Peggle 2, and Golf With Your Friends.
With so many games left hanging, obviously Friday was all about new ones.
We played All You Need is Help for a bit. It is horrendously confusing on how to start a game, particularly since you can’t start with only three players and one of us needed to control two characters. I accidentally discovered this while we were all pressing random things to try to start a game, which meant I spent most of my time getting very confused over which stick was controlling which character.






We got a notification that we had completed the first set of levels, but couldn’t work out how to unlock any others. So we didn’t, and we moved on.
The surprise hit of the evening was Lonely Mountains Snow Riders, a follow-up to Lonely Mountains Downhill. The Downhill game saw you getting a bike down dangerously thin and steep paths, avoiding trees and bushes and cliffs and sudden jumps. Snow Riders loses the bike, gives you skis, and adds in online multiplayer which immediately makes the mountains a bit less lonely. It seems to control much better than Downhill, from what I remember, and paths are wider and more forgiving. That’s not to say it’s easy; working out how to hit a jump at the right angle and speed so you can clear a river or gully took multiple deaths in almost all cases. On one of the courses we had all died a minimum of 23 times.
The mode we played was a race, but it wasn’t as easy as just holding the crouch button and steering. Getting down the mountain had multiple paths between each checkpoint, some of which may have been faster but which required skill that I certainly didn’t have. When you die you reset to the last checkpoint passed, meaning that each waypoint down the mountain gave a feeling of relief; there were occasions when one of us crashed just before crossing the checkpoint, at which point the silence on the microphone was noticeable.






I may well go back to Snow Riders by myself at some point, but there’s a lot of content there and I can foresee us trying that game again on a future gaming evening.