Lonely Mountains: Downhill
One of the best non-Nintendo games on the original Switch was Megagon Industries’ 2019 masterpiece Lonely Mountain: Downhill. It’s a beautiful casual mountain biking game that sent us players to beautiful different mountains and landscapes to ride downhill and find new routes.
The first thing that catches your eye in the game is its stunningly beautiful nature and art style. You quickly forget you’re playing a video game and just enjoy exploring the changing mountainscapes and downhill trails.
There are a bunch of mountains and each mountain has a bunch of trails that you can ride down either casually or by attempting to complete challenges like reaching the goal with less time or with fewer crashes.
At the first glance, there’s a clear trail down. But this game has such a masterful level design and quickly you’ll learn that you can take shortcuts that challenge your bike handling but significantly cut down your times. And the more you play, the more you’ll discover new things at the levels that make you marvel at the beauty of their design.
Some of the new routes you discover as you move through and see all the options you can take but what really makes it special to me is that a lot of them — thanks to the camera positioning — you notice afterwards. You go around a rock formation and circle back, only to notice that there’s a slope leading from above into where you just went and the next time you can look into how to access it.
It sparks curiosity and encourages hauling your bike back to the top of the mountain to do it again, even if you’ve scored good times prior. There’s so much to explore.
Camera positioning makes this game deviously challenging to master. You’re always only seeing a small portion of what’s coming up so to become fast enough to beat the best times, you need to find the best routes and memorise the routes as it becomes too difficult to react fast enough.
Downhill also got five different DLC mountains: paid DLC Eldfjall Island — that adds a volcanic island with a new mountain with new trails and beautiful nature to enjoy — as well as four free new mountains in Riley’s Return, Misty Peak, Redmoor Falls and Rivera’s Revenge. It’s never been a better moment to grab Downhill and its DLCs and spend some time touching digital grass.
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders
I was so excited when at the start of 2026, while going through Helmet Gaming Challenge 2026 and thinking I could replay Downhill for “A game made by a small indie team or individual developer”, I discovered that they had published a sequel to the game, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders in 2025. I decided to play it instead for the “A game set in a snowy and cold world” category.
Snow Riders has the same idea as Downhill but it replaces mountain biking with downhill skiing.
One of the things I want to praise from the get-go is how both games have control schemes that feel very different and yet similar. Downhill has very sharp and immediate controls which feels perfect for mountain biking and Snow Riders has more flowy controls that feel authentic to skiing. Still, coming from Downhill, I was immediately able to pick up and become somewhat proficient with the new controls.
Another difference to Downhill is that you get to choose how you position the camera. Now there’s an option to position the camera behind you which makes it way easier to figure out where you’re going. On the first go, I was excited about it but after revisiting Downhill again, I’m not sure which one I prefer. The original camera mode brings such an intriguing challenge to the game.
A bigger, fundamental change is how the snow makes it less obvious where the trails go. It provides way more flexibility and freedom in choosing your routes but also makes it harder especially in the beginning to figure out what direction you should go towards.
I praised Downhill for its great level design and once again, they’ve succeeded in Snow Riders, despite the levels being so different. Instead of very narrow and technically challenging, you’re thrown into wide and exciting skiing slopes breathing fresh air into the concept.
Snow Riders has also gotten its first DLC already. Highlands adds a new mountain with 8 different slopes, as well as some new challenges and gear.
All images are from Megagon Industries’ press kits.