Once your truck is stuck, there’s two options: drive another vehicle out there to help lift, push or pull you out, or Recover it to your home garage and try again. It’s workmanlike, it’s necessarily dull even, but the last thing you want is to fail. You’ll feather the accelerator, going at a slow and steady pace for much of the game, because the only thing you’re really aiming for is to keep going and eventually get to where you’re headed.
The way you have to nudge the controls, cautiously trying your best just to keep your truck going in a straight line means that you don’t suddenly start to treat it like some kind of dune buggy.
It doesn’t take long for it to make sense. If you simply hold left or right, you’ll careen off the road, and into a ravine or a mud pit from which you’ll never escape. The wheels don’t just point in the direction your analogue stick is pointing, you have to nudge them back and forth. The first thing you’ll notice is that this is a driving game that doesn’t handle like any other driving game you’ve ever played. You start the game off with a plucky Chevy pick-up truck and set out on the road. The key difference is that it’s methodical, it’s unrelenting, and you’ll be close to sobbing over the discovery that you’ve taken a batch of planks to the wrong place. If you’re the kind of person who spends their time climbing to the top of every vantage point in Assassin’s Creed, or driving from one side of the Forza Horizon map to the other just for the sheer hell of it, SnowRunner will scratch that same free-form itch. SnowRunner is a game about exploration, it’s Breath of the Wild for truck drivers.
Rather than embellishing it, Saber Interactive have presented it as is, and in doing so, may have just given us one of the most transcendental driving experiences of the year. This a game that forgoes the general sense of what makes a video game by presenting you with realism. Halfway up a mountain with no signs of civilisation through your windows, threading your way through the trees as stones dangerously scrape the bottom of your vehicle there are times where SnowRunner reminds me of a Welsh misadventure in my old, beaten up Peugeot 206.
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