STEEP

Steep speaks Super Hexagon's language better than any other game I've ever played of this nature.
The game works despite its desire for realism and simulation (brands, names, realistic graphics), and more in its obsession to navigate a space, gliding on a ski or snowboard is a communion a dance with the mountain (fuck if they even talk occasionally, literally).
A dance in which, depending on the day, the hills become infinite possibilities of combinations of tricks, and other signatures of your presence; others, in possible detours that will mark a new route. The missions serve to restrict and concentrate these two visions, but once you begin to exist in the displacement of your avatar exercised by the mountain, Traced routes are no longer necessary, all the routes open before you. The sled, which should be included in the basic game because of the great opening it means, contrasts sharply with snowboarding or skiing: In these a straight line means letting the ground push you, in the sled is the most difficult position to have, even standing still is a fight against the mountain and its terrain. It lacks the sick tricks and the lightness of snowboarding or skiing, but this is because the sled focuses on the detail, on the small descents, on the texture of the stones and how it affects your body, depending on your position, while skiing and snowboarding, on the other hand, are a more general vision, of the whole mountain and more, of starting at one point and getting lost until you encounter a frozen river.
To this you add a landscape rich in details, where each mountain has its own personality, and exploring takes on a new value, not to unlock more missions and content (as the game seems to assume), but to find new ways to zurcate the space, share them with your friends, look for that perfect hill that you know they'll love, and then run it over and over, to find and commentate multiple ways of understanding the path; or maybe not, maybe it just takes you somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't in your plans.
Playing sports games with friends has always seemed strange to me, there is always a kind of disconnection, especially in racing, as if each one were in their own car, their own world, but in Steep, maybe because we are constantly adapting to that terrain, that curve in which we both die , but then another takes a different path and, ah, there it comes, all over again. Maybe because Steep opens you everywhere at all times, something like VVVVVV does with the platform: You still have that very risky jump into the void that you don't know where it will take you, but that it is necessary to take, because only then will you access the true beauty of the mountain.
Steep works despite many things, its dlc, the segmentation of its missions (although having to discover the mountains was a right guess), and if you hurry me, maybe even their preciousness. Without its AAA vulgarity, nor its extra content, nor its fear of making you wait for the good, always wanting to put new challenges, instant teleportation, levels that almost only serve to show off to others and with an XP system that treats you with an insufferable condescension (not the tricks or time punctuation); under all that, a game is hidden that drinks from the best of Tony Hawk and Super Hexagon, and with that vitalist slowness of Proteus; Maybe in its most refined version Steep would only be composed of rides created by users, nothing more: alternative routes, always.

Nabucodonosor 560 BC