The Pause Menu

New Star GP is like the tapas of racing games. The game serves a little of classical arcade racing in its driving mechanics and visuals, some simulation in tyre choice and pit strategy, a portion of Need for Speed-style upgrades, and even – dare I say it – a touch of Mario Kart in the rocket boost mechanics.

All this gives the game a “jack of all trades, master of none” feel. Some parts work better than others, however. I enjoyed the combination of the arcade-y driving and visuals with the simulation-style strategy of managing your tires and fuel. This created some real nail-biting moments when I tried to push for just-one-more-lap whilst my fuel reached its last bar, or as the rain started to fall more heavily.

I also liked the multiple game-modes embedded into the long career, keeping the game fairly fresh even when the driving mechanics became quite stale. A particular highlight was pissing off a competitor in a race so severely they angrily challenge you to a one-on-one rivals race later on. Moments like this give the game a real sense of charm.

Other parts did not work, however. The need to manage your team in between races – presumably inspired by games like F1 Manager – felt redundant at best and frustrating at worst. Keeping my commercial manager happy, for example, clearly had little bearing on the game itself, especially when you’re given the option to literally buy their happiness at a cheap price. Hiring and firing staff members also felt pointless and more hassle than it was worth.

Other elements didn’t just feel redundant, but negatively affected the gameplay experience. Upgrading your car, for example, felt significantly unbalanced. The gimmick is that over the course of each 10-grand prix season, you and your opponents must upgrade your car to stay competitive. However, it’s pretty clear that your opponent is not actually upgrading, but rather that the AI difficulty is just adapting to your skill level. This creates an artificial feeling of difficulty that tries to make your upgrades feeling meaningful, but instead creates an oscillating effect where if one race is too easy, the next will be difficult, and vice versa. The difficulty problems are only worsened when you realize that it is only you that gets the nitro-boost mechanic each lap, giving you a clear unfair advantage over your AI opponents.

Ultimately, New Star GP tries to do too much, sacrificing technical depth for superfluous and sometimes overbearing mechanics. Just like tapas, the game is satisfying enough, but you come away still a little hungry for more.

There was a time when nearly anyone with a home console owned a snowboarding game. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, critical and commercial successes like 1080 Snowboarding (1998), SSX Tricky (2001), and SSX (2003) dominated the market and spawned a dozen not-so-acclaimed knock-offs. Then, somewhere in the mid-2000s, these winter sports games fell out of favour; they disappeared.

So what happened? One likely reason is that these games were extraordinarily same-y. Games that attempted to replicate the success of SSX usually felt derivative. They copied not just the series’ arcadey gameplay but its aesthetic and humour, too: and, by the late 2000s, the bombastic, hyperactive, maximalist vibe was just not doing it anymore. Even more recent attempts to renew the genre, such as Rider’s Republic (2021), hold an echo of this feeling. As a result, even in 2025 there is a remarkable – and disappointing – dearth of games in this genre.   

               What the genre needs, then, is exploration and experimentation – and this is where Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders (2025) stands out. Quite the opposite of SSX’s gaudy silliness, Lonely Mountains is a slow, no-frills game – it’s your character and your skis, and you have to get to the bottom of a big snowy hill without falling off. That’s it. No power-ups, no boost, no insane tricks with crazy multiplier bonuses.

               Make no mistake, though, this is not an easy game. This is tricky, risk-reward gameplay, where a slight misinput is the difference between gliding carelessly past a tree at 60kmh or faceplanting directly into it. Mastery over player movement is everything. And gratefully, the movement is excellently weighted and extremely responsive. You can feel the changes in friction as you glide over differing depths of snow; you must balance speed and control on a second-to-second basis. This can be punishing, but still remains forgiving enough to produce some exhilarating holy-shit-I-cant-believe-I-got-away-with-that moments. Rarely do you crash and think it wasn’t your fault – the promise of control is always there, even if you can’t quite grasp it yet.

               The game’s presentation is also excellent. Trails are calm and quiet. There’s no music, just the ambient sounds of the mountain and your skis swishing through the snow. The art direction is beautiful, too – the mountains glitter in the sun, and snow whips gently in the wind. It’s like you’re playing a game inside a long-forgotten snowglobe.

               These clean aesthetics extend to the game’s philosophy, too. This is a no-bullshit game, with simple, intuitive game-modes, and no commercialized battle-passes, microtransactions, et cetera – even though it would’ve been easy enough to shoehorn these into the game’s multiplayer. The result of this is a friendly and charming multiplayer experience, where players of all skill levels are cheered for simply crossing the finish line, and where competition arises organically – not from level markers or skill-based matchmaking. Stumbling upon someone roughly of your skill level often leads to tense one-on-one races where you push each other to your limits in friendly rivalry – it reminds me of the multiplayer days of yore, before rampant commercialization.

               There is one sticking point that may put off some people, however: the camera. Instead of opting for a simple over-the-shoulder perspective, the game uses a static camera that shifts to different predetermined positions as you move through the track. This is intended, I imagine, as an additional challenge in the game: when the camera is behind you, the goal is speed; but when it’s in front of you and you can’t see what’s coming next, it’s a game of momentum and anticipation.

               This adds to the game’s novelty, for sure, but the effect isn’t always great: the constant shifting occasionally feels like you’re watching your character from the perspective of an indecisive drone, and at high speeds, it almost gave me motion sickness. After a few dozen hours with the game, I ‘get’ the camera and what it’s aiming to do – but I still can’t help but wonder if the game would be more satisfying if it just remained still. This is one of those things that is purely personal taste – some will be turned off the game on account of it, and some will love it for its unique challenge.

               Nevertheless, Lonely Mountains succeeds not just because it is an excellently realized, beautifully-made game: it succeeds because it innovates and advances a fading genre. By inverting the lurid, high-octane style of most winter sports games and injecting it with a contemporary focus on mechanical challenge, the game poses the question: what more could this genre be with some daring experimentation? For this reason, Lonely Mountains deserves a place as one of the best and most exciting games in its category.

There’s an as-yet-unnamed subgenre of video games that’s analogous to arthouse cinema. Philosophical in theme, non-linear in its storytelling, and visually experimental, Alan Wake 2 is now surely one of the exemplars of this category, taking its place among the other usual suspects – Silent Hill 2, The Stanley Parable, Deus Ex, etc.

Being the cultured and refined gamer that I am (read: pretentious and insufferable), I knew I had to play it. Ultimately, I was impressed. This is a game that respects the player’s intelligence. There is a sharp directorial vision that makes no concessions to didactically spelling out its central message. Everything in the game, from the brilliantly executed visual design to the not-so-brilliantly executed ambiguous ending, is constructed to maintain an pervasive sense of disorientation and unease. If you’ve watched a David Lynch film, you know this feeling. This isn’t accidental: auteurist director Sam Lake has professed Lynch as the main inspiration for his work.

And for me, that’s kind of the problem with Alan Wake 2: it draws so much from the language of film that one begins to wonder why it bothers being a video game in the first place. The most obvious example, of course, are the live-action cinematics. Frequent, highly stylized and well-acted, these break up the gameplay and also interrupt it through the use of cutaway jump scares. The cinematography here is bold and excellent – as the player-character, you’ll find yourself walking through scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-budget HBO show. The influence of film, too, is evident in the game’s motifs: you’re on a talk-show, televisions are often interactable objects, there’s a level in a cinema, two of the characters are filmmakers, et cetera.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with making cinematic games, of course. Some of the most acclaimed games of the last fifteen years, such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us, resonate because they use a filmic style that feels immediately recognizable and comfortable for the player.

In Alan Wake 2, though, the devotion to cinema clashes directly with the gameplay. This is not just because the combat and movement are clunky or frustrating (though that certainly doesn’t help). It’s also that the gameplay elements designed to forward the story are so banal they feel anti-immersive. For example, the plot-switching mechanic in Wake’s sections has the potential to use the unique interactivity of gaming to advance and deepen the story. But in practice, it amounts to little more than clicking through each option until you find the right one.

Similarly, Saga’s case board could have acted as an excellent mechanism through which to get at her thought process on a deeper level, as John’s diary is in RDR2 – but ends up being a simple event log, no more than a pace-killing chore when you’re occasionally forced to update it. Further, the ability to switch between the two characters’ storylines is a nice touch that utilizes the non-linear potential of video games, but in practice doesn’t do a great deal to deepen the story in any meaningful sense.

Eventually it started to feel like Alan Wake 2’s gameplay got in the way of the story. I was simply walking between cinematic cutscenes, killing a few irritating bad guys and solving some cookie-cutter puzzles along the way. It is ironic, I feel, that a game that primarily explores the interrelations between mediums, and between medium and reality, is completely lacklustre in its attempts to merge its gameplay with its cinematic elements.

Ultimately, Alan Wake II proves that video games can rival the visual and narrative quality of prestige TV – but by overlooking the uniquely storytelling potential of interactivity, you start to question whether it needed to be a video game at all.