This is Alto’s Adventure. It’s an endless runner in which you snowboard down a mountain to rescue your runaway llamas, doing tricks and avoiding obstacles along the way.
I love this game. It plays well, but what sets it apart is how lovely and chill it is. So much polish has gone into the atmosphere and it pays off. There’s the obvious stuff, like a beautiful art style and a soothing soundtrack, but on top of that are so many little touches. The sun moves across the sky, setting and rising as you play, changing not just brightness but color warmth and really selling the feeling that you’ve been snowboarding all night and a new day has dawned around you. Rainstorms come and go, with no effect on gameplay but helping the setting feel more like a living world. The sounds your board makes on the snow or when grinding on bunting lines or rooftops are rich and vivid - for me, they’re borderline ASMR-inducing when I play with headphones. And I love the way that the llamas slide down slopes instead of running once the incline is steep enough.
It all comes together to create a profound sense of joyful speed and solitude, coasting down this starkly beautiful yet somehow cozy mountainside. You’re one with the wind and the snow, and all there is is the descent in front of you. Obstacles and opportunities keep coming and you need to react to them just in time - once you learn and internalize how to respond to each situation that can arise, you do so without conscious thought, faster than conscious thought, the experience flowing through you as you flow down the mountain.
Endless runners are a lot like rhythm games in this way - they create flow by presenting you with a series of rapid-fire cues you have to respond to without taking time to think. But in runners, the cues are procedurally generated, so you can’t memorize them and they can last forever. It’s like a song that never ends but keeps growing and changing. A theme with endless variation.
I’ve played a lot of endless runners that tweak the formula in various ways. But somehow, Alto’s Adventure is the one that most reminds me of where the genre got its start. It’s the one that feels the most like a pure descendant of the game that first popularized endless runners, the first one I ever played: Canabalt.
I don’t speak for everyone, but based on the comments I could find online, I think a lot of people share my reason: Rhythm games let us lose ourselves in music, and that feels good.
Musicians will tell you: when things are going well, making music puts you in a euphoric state of complete absorption. You are no longer aware of your own self as a separate entity; you’re one with the music. An anonymous composer put it this way:
“You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist. I have experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching it in a state of awe and wonderment. And [the music] just flows out of itself.”
This quote was provided by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his TED talk on “flow”. Flow is a popular term in games analysis, but in case you haven’t come across it before, here’s a brief summary: “flow” is a term coined and popularized by Csikszentmihalyi to refer to a particular mental and emotional state of being “in the zone”. It’s a form of focus that allows for continual high-level performance without conscious thought. Researchers studying this state in musicians have described it as “effortless attention.”
A rhythm platformer with an Atari 2600-inspired aesthetic. Your character runs automatically, you avoid obstacles and collect gold by jumping, sliding, kicking or blocking at the right time, and your actions affect the music. It’s really good at creating flow, and to avoid breaking that flow, messing up causes the level to immediately restart.
Let’s make a graph. The horizontal axis is player skill. On the far left is no skill - just random button-pushing. On the far right is perfect video game godhood, always doing exactly the correct thing at the correct time in the correct way. The first time you play a game, you’ll probably be somewhere in the middle - farther right if you’re a veteran gamer, farther left if you’re a novice. As you play the game, and learn its mechanics, you’ll trend right as you get better.
The vertical axis is performance level. At the very bottom is complete failure - game over as quickly as possible, not achieving any of the game’s goals. Farther up is the passing line, separating failure below from success above. The line itself is a performance level of just barely passing a challenge - surviving the boss fight with one hit point left, clearing the race course just before the clock runs out, and so on. And at the very top of the axis is absolute perfect performance - winning by the largest margin possible.
Now we can chart the performance levels achievable with a particular amount of player skill: the “skill curve” for a given challenge.