STEEP

We can see our house from heeeeeeerrrrrrre!

THERE’S A POINT in Steep when the mountain starts talking. It has an echoing, female voice, the sort of thing you’d expect from millions of tons of rock if it had been possessed by the spirit of Galadriel, perhaps seeking a winter getaway.

It’s odd, because you’re not expecting it—up to this point, you’ve been encouraged to jump off things, and whoop it up—and what the mountain says cuts to the heart of what Ubisoft intended with the game. It describes itself as a playground, a place to make memories, and takes things too far by pretending to be puzzled by the weird “skis” people are using on its slopes.

Skiing is one of four sports in the game—five, if you count walking. There’s snowboarding and paragliding, too, or you can ease into a wingsuit, dragging one of Far Cry4’s more distinctive modes of transport out of the closet, and jump off a mountain whenever the mood takes you.

Graphically, there’s a lot of white, although special mention has to be made of the crunchy snow simulation, even if it sometimes appears too “digital”— your board leaves a distinct pattern of depressions, rather than cutting smoothly through—and the curious lack of feedback from running over someone else’s trails. The ability to change the time of day is a nice touch, as are the hot air balloons, anchored somehow in the air above the Alps to provide additional launching points for wingsuiters.

Imagine a FarCry game with no main quest drawing you to specific areas. Instead, wherever one side-quest takes you, you pick up three more. You can go where you want, and progress is made by completing events, scoring points by performing tricks, discovering areas, missing obstacles, and finding creative routes down the mountain. As you advance, more areas unlock, and you get a feel for the mountains. They really are a playground, with no penalties for messing up, and speedy restarts if you really can’t get back to the course.

We had a few moments when we couldn’t, the game finding it impossible to decide what to do with our boarder when he encountered the back of a building, or one of the interminable snow fences that litter the landscape. Instead, it decided to spin him around, flipping from left to right so fast that the game couldn’t keep up (the frame rate was locked at 60 for most of our time with the game, sacrifices being made in the fidelity of distant objects rather than let the fps dip). And once Steep crosses the line from a game about barreling down hills as fast as you can to one of pure analog control, that mountain’s words start to make a lot more sense. This is a playground, and it’s through exploration and having fun that you can make it your own.

VERDICT8Steep

DEEP Good sense of speed; plenty to discover; wellcalibrated controls.

WEEP Occasional glitches; inconsistent collision detection; patchy signposting.

RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.5GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0GHz; 8 GB RAM; GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 390.

$50, http://steep.ubisoft.com, ESRB: T

Events sometimes see you joined by NPCs, or you can team up with human players.

Complete an event, and you keep going, ready for the next.

Skiing backward is easy, and trees don’t mind if you hit them.

Trudging uphill to a start point is a pain.