If You Enjoyed Snowrunner, Over the Hill Looks Like a Must-Play

A lot of people play games like Snowrunner and Expeditions to chill out. That was initially surprising to me, until I did it myself. There’s a “flow”—a nerve-relaxed state you get into when you play them, as mournful guitar mixes with the pitter-patter of rain on a craggy trail, or that refreshing sight of a watch tower as the sun falls. So, it shouldn’t have been surprising when Art of Rally developer Dune Casu introduced Over the Hill, an overlanding game that can be played alone but, like those titles mentioned, is best experienced when your friends hit the trail with you. The first gameplay trailer has dropped, and it has me even more excited.

One of the things that immediately catches your eye in this footage is how minimal the interface is while driving. There’s a map in the lower-left corner and an indicator for four-wheel drive high or low, and that’s it. It appears to be very contextual, though, surfacing trail starts with augmented reality-type graphics and presenting winch controls only when they’re relevant. Over the Hill seems less of a nuts-and-bolts simulation than Mudrunner, of course, so perhaps it can get away with a more streamlined presentation. But in any case, I think it does the game favors.

It’s also clear from the gameplay that the camera does an excellent job of framing the environment. You can apparently switch between near and far views, so you can take in all the scenery when you’d like, then zero in on challenging spots as necessary. An expansive perspective and free camera control are really important in this sort of game, and if the camera was, say, static and always drawn out like in Art of Rally, it wouldn’t really help things.

I’ve got to shout out one more thing here: the water effects. We only get a brief glimpse at how water interacts with a vehicle when the player car drives through it at about 20 seconds in, but it’s really satisfying. The way the concentric ripples catch the lights of the truck, and those reflections disappear as the water calms is just a sight to behold. We also see how a crystal-clear lake reflects the mountain and trees above it like glass in another scene. This is going to be one pretty game, but then I suppose we knew that from the jump.

Developer Funselektor is assembling players for a playtest of Over the Hill soon, ahead of its to-be-determined release date. If you’re interested and have a PC to play on, you can sign up via the studio’s Discord server. And if you game on a PlayStation or Nintendo Switch, don’t fret—Art of Rally made it to those platforms in time, and it’s likely Over the Hill will, too.

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