One of my favorite games is about riding pushbikes down hills really fast. It's called Descenders, and lately I've been playing its follow-up Descenders Next, which appeared at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today. At first I was a bit nervous about Descenders Next, because it's the sequel to a game about riding pushbikes downhill, and yet it doesn't have pushbikes. Instead, it has snowboards.
As I'm sure you can appreciate, these are two very different things. But they do share one important quality: they can both go downhill really, really fast.
I'm no longer nervous about Descenders Next. What I've played is brilliant, and like its predecessor it beats the blockbuster competition—think Riders Republic—in terms of the sheer poetry of its gamefeel. This is a videogame about going really fast on a snowboard, performing dazzling tricks midair, and mastering a control system that feels great out of the box but blossoms with subtle complexity over time. A game like this must feel not just good but incredible in the hand. It must give me complete hairbreadth control over my hurtling avatar. I must feel assured that every wipe out is my own fault. Get one of these wrong and everything feels broken. Descenders Next ticks every box.
The structure will be familiar to Descenders players, though it hybridises what used to be two discrete game modes. Starting with two lives, I have to complete short (we're talking two minutes max) downhill courses towards the next "park," which serves as both a savepoint and a chill out sandbox. If I use all my lives before reaching a park, I lose my progress and go back to the last park I unlocked. If I pull off mini-objectives mid course—such as performing two midair backflips, or reaching a certain speed milestone—I get an extra life. When I complete a course, I can select one of several from the world menu, all leading in different directions towards different parks.
This gives Descenders Next a blissed-out arcade feel: weaving between deathly trees at high speed on my last life before the next park is nail-biting, yes, but overall I’m not too concerned because whether I reach the goal or not I’m loving every moment. It’s the small things that contribute to this: after death, restarts are instantaneous. When I’ve done my dash and run out of lives, I’m thrown back to map and within seconds I’m back on the slopes. There’s no traversing an open world towards icons. There is no resistance along the way to getting on the field and going really fast down hills.
Descenders was basically a sport roguelike; Descenders Next adopts a smoothed over version of its progression system where punishment is less severe. It rewards progress with the aforementioned parks, which are stress-free sandboxes for practising or just mucking around in. I spent most of my time in Descenders mucking around in the parks (chiefly Mount Slope) and while none I've seen so far in Descenders Next are as spectacular as my favorites from the first game, I'm sure (I'm hoping!) they'll come.
This sequel, then, adopts all of the best qualities of its predecessor while adding something that was arguably missing before: atmosphere. Descenders Next's soundtrack is back-to-back ethereal house and trance, blanketing the slopes in an energetic and dreamlike mood. It also adopts the Forza Horizon trick of making me feel really good about everything I do, accident or otherwise. If I do a little skid I gain a small amount of "rep" for skidding. If I do a spectacular double backflip while hurtling between the bars of an electrical transmission tower, I get even more rep. It's just dopamine hit after dopamine hit, and that's before mentioning this game's superlative sense of speed: when I'm coursing down slopes at nearly 80 kilometres per hour the screen edges become slightly distorted in a way that captures the tightrope tension between the thrill of speed and fear of imminent death.
I do hope there are more obstacles—currently we have tiny wooden cabins to weave through, electrical towers, and the usual array of ramps. But what I've played of Descenders Next is really just brushing the top: when it hits early access next year it'll eventually, over time, offer other extreme sport styles such as mountain boarding (basically skateboards with huge wheels) and different biomes to accommodate those sports. In the meantime, test sessions have just gone live: check out the official site for more details.
