Increasingly, games are looking to the environment to tell their stories. It’s easy enough to see why. On one side the natural world is moving closer and closer to the centre of our thought, as the climate crisis becomes more urgent and less easy to ignore. On the other, it becomes a great device for telling a story of impending, existential disaster – or indeed one of the hope to be found in the aftermath. And, above all, pretty environments sell.
But alongside the rise of environmentally aware games is a little micro-surge of environmentally ones. Which is to say, games that are less about the environment as they are about that way you think about it, the connection that forms between your mind and the world around you. Metaphysics, basically, or mindfulness, if we want to narrow it down further. In particular I’m thinking of a couple of mindfulness games from the end of last year, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and A Short Hike, which both look to use the natural world to turn your own gaze inwards, and both happen to use mountains – specifically going either up a mountain or down one, although there aren’t many other things to do with mountains in fairness – to achieve the kind of effect I think they’re after.
If you haven’t played these two – and you really should – their magic is in the way they spark a kind of heightened awareness of the world you’re playing in, the joy of these games being the joy of being in nature itself. In Lonely Mountains it’s through kinesis, the actual movements you make and the momentum you feel from them as you go. The world is silent and pristine, only punctured by the whirring of your bicycle’s spokes or chirping birds and the occasional of water. The invitation is there for you to feel your way through a course, more than to plan it, and in doing so it gets closer to the reality of a downhill sport than many other, more explicitly realist games have before it. The magic of going downhill is the sensation – the fear, the reaction to and control of kinetic energy, the proximity to actual death and how that triggers a heightened awareness of life – and so Lonely Mountains touches on a kind of reality games rarely seem to access.