Canadian studio Snowman has released its beautiful endless 2D snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure on iOS. It’ll cost your $1.99 to purchase it on the App Store.
You play as a villager who is snowboarding down an infinite mountain, chasing llamas, and catching big air to do a few stunts. There’s a high score to chase but the environments and subtle touches of story are what make the game worth playing.
You’ll pass by tall forests, cosy towns buried in the snow, and icy vistas brought to life by electric storms. Along the way there are ramps over chasms and grinding opportunities. By completing challenges you can unlock new characters that each have their own stunts, too.
While Alto’s Adventure doesn’t escape the repetitive loop of endless arcade games its creators have found a way to blend each replay into one wholesome experience. This is due to the day/night cycle that isn’t broken by you bailing. So if you fall off when it’s dusk you’ll return to the game at around the same time in the day, giving the effect that all your efforts are one after the other – it helps that the environments cycle randomly, remixing themselves with different background scenes and foreground activities.
As well as chasing llamas, if you snowboard far enough you’ll be chased by an elder who rides one of the llamas to chase you with a stick. You don’t quite find out why – that’s part of the game’s mystery – but it does add another element to the gameplay, in that if you go to slow you’ll be beaten and fall off the board.
Oh, and you may have noticed that your scarf gets longer as you collect more trinkets in a reference to thatgamecompany’s Journey on PS3. It shares some of the same sumptuous scenery with that game, too.
