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When Art of Rally creator Dune Casu announced his next project, Over the Hill, I was excited. Full disclosure: I’m horrendous at Art of Rally, but pairing that game’s refined and calming visual palette with overlanding, ideally somewhere remote and serene, just made all the sense in the world to me. Today, a public demo goes live for the game, and we’ve been playing it over the last week.
Over the Hill begins with a brief tutorial that will be very familiar to anyone who has played games like Snowrunner or Spintires. The objective is to familiarize yourself with toggles for crucial items, like high and low gearing and your truck’s winch, to overcome the varied challenges that terrain throws at you. Frankly, I was surprised how similar Over the Hill feels in these moments to those aforementioned titles, but then I suppose there are only so many ways to assemble an off-roading experience.
The critical difference, though, is that Over the Hill’s energy is less “Ice Road Truckers” and more C418’s Minecraft soundtrack. Also, while you will pull helpless fellow explorers out of the ruts they’ve gotten themselves into in this game, at least in this demo, there weren’t really any complicated, multi-part jobs, requiring you to accept a contract and then set about fulfilling it. Over the Hill feels more dynamic and freeform than that. Open up your map, drop a waypoint on a point of interest, and see what you find. It could be a useful item or tool, a cabin (basically the map’s fast-travel hubs), or a task. And I personally appreciate the lack of friction.
The vehicle selection looks to be pretty limited at launch, and geared more toward civilian metal than tractor-trailers and stuff with more than two axles. There are also some cool tools at your disposal, like the ability to place an anchor for a winch or lie down planks anywhere you have limited grip. Adam Ismail
You can do all of this together or alone—and that’s also true of the demo. My fellow PC gamer here at The Drive, Byron, rolled out with me to explore Emerald Lake, one of the three sub-areas within the game’s Canada region, inspired by The Valhallas in British Columbia. We’ve heard that the difficulty and technique required ramps up in the later maps, but Emerald Lake starts you off smoothly, with wide-open valleys bearing tall grass and few trees. It’s a good choice for the demo.
That’s not to say you can’t get yourself into trouble, and, outside of rare cases where the physics did something I wasn’t quite expecting them to, the actual act of driving feels good and, frankly, not terribly different than in Snowrunner. Naturally, when the going gets tough, low gears are your friend; though, unlike in Snowrunner, you don’t have to worry about locking diffs. Also, in Over the Hill, it takes longer than you’d expect to flood an engine, maybe 10 seconds. Ask me how I know.
In the full version of the game, this boat will take you to another area in the Canada environment. Adam Ismail
The biggest issue both Byron and I encountered in this demo was performance. On paper, Over the Hill should be a relatively light lift: an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU are the minimum listed specs on the game’s Steam page. My rig has a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Radeon 9070 XT, and at 1440p resolution, the framerate constantly wavered and crashed to some astonishing lows. Strangely, both of us found that when we ventured away from trees on the map, things cleared up dramatically, so perhaps this is a bug the devs can stamp out quickly, especially now that the game is about to be tested on many different kinds of builds.
There’s a photo book where you can collect pictures of wildlife! Adam Ismail
While roaming nature, I kept asking myself what Over the Hill’s unique selling point could be. I mean, sure—it’s got that minimalist art style going for it, and an obviously chill vibe, but it’s not like Snowrunner isn’t similarly therapeutic in the right mindset. Then, I reached the waypoint I’d set on a dark end of the map, and a view I didn’t expect—mountain peaks breaking away to the sides, and a glass blue lake stretching into the horizon in front of me. I don’t ever remember sights like that stopping me cold in other off-roading games, and that is why I’m excited to learn what other discoveries Over the Hill has in store for all of us when the full release drops later this year.
Developer Funselektor says every map in this game is handmade, with no procedural generation used. Strelka Games
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
