Review | Sledding Game - Friend Slope
I recall somewhere in the deep, deep past, a warm place where I accepted, without the slightest awareness of the great echoing importance of it, a friendship. I remember leaning through a kitchen window of my parents' ground floor commie block apartment to hand an ice cream to a younger boy who was from then on a fast friend of mine. I remember spending a night at a pal's house taking turns as we farmed Mephisto in Diablo II, trading the hot seat in repeat games of Age of Wonders, swapping CDs of Westwood bootlegs. There are older times, too, pre-digital memories of eating cream and cheese in the countryside with a little girl that was dropped off for the summer with her grandparents, just like I was. In the truly blurry haze of earliest memory making, I remember a small child who was being taught for the first time, just as I was, to greet a peer.
Time passes. The past turns dreamlike. The friend-making process never stops, of course. I continued meeting people across uncertain adolescence, hopeful early adulthood, and doomed maturity. However you see it, a friend is a symbiote, a kindred soul, a survival resource. Someone who needs from you generally the same things you need from them.
I was thinking about this while playing Sledding Game with some friends of mine. Relative to the span of my life, new friends, but great ones. People who give me hope. This was a meditation spurred by my need for them and the hours that we spent screwing around in Sledding Game were nothing more or less than medicine that feels like sunshine.
Released little over a month ago in Early Access, Sledding Game (whose developer, amusingly, is none other than The Sledding Corporation) skis on the decidedly embryonic end of the slope. It has no characters but the player avatars and a surly Yeti who launches you with one blow away from the edge of the map. More platform than structure, the game works best for people who are already cool with each other. (Did I mention that my friends and I once messed around in the lobby of Deep Rock Galactic for hours without launching any missions?)
How does it work? Hosting or joining a server will spawn you as one of three animal-shaped beans — a frog, bear, or penguin — in the vicinity of a lodge. The lodge is in the conveniently flat and central valley of a mountain. If you know what a ski resort is, you know where you are, but the game replaces the bourgeois accoutrements with sleds. Once you're in the world you can press the sled button to zoom away with a mid-leap flourish.
Whether freestyling or competing against your friends, the game rewards your sledding achievements with points. You spend the points to customize yourself with hats and scarves and acquire new sleds. There are secondary games like ice fishing, throwing darts, and a slew of non-minigame interactions in the form of toasting marshmallows or making snowmen, or just flopping around. The structured entertainment is provided by the purpose-made racing slopes which you ascend with ski lifts and descend, one hopes, atop your sled, rather than say, your naked behind. Because it makes complete sense, you can also shoot yourself out of cannons.
The experience feels very much like early access, though landing very far away from the production mode's negative associations. Perhaps the most vital question is where Sledding Game stands in relation to other friend-friendly games. It lacks the structure of a challenge-driven game like Peak, so if that's what you want, look elsewhere. It features somewhat opaque controls, so those who want to master a movement system may have something to chew on. It stands somewhere between a party game with its small organized entertainments and a chill out game for groups of people in various stages of knowing each other. Would I go back to it? Not really. Would I go back to it if someone asked me? Perhaps, if that person was a friend.
Sledding Game was played on PC using a code provided by the publisher.
