When it comes to Snowrunner, what I really want to tell you about is the back window of the starter truck. I appreciate this is not a normal sort of thing to come away from a game with, but isn’t that just Snowrunner in general?
Anyway: most of the time the back window is just a back window. Through it you get a partial view of the truck interior – the dash, the seats, a guy at the wheel trying to stay in control. But then the truck jounces and rolls and lists and yaws and that window catches the light a certain way. Suddenly, the texture! The glass is not just something you look through but something you look at – it’s covered with a fine layer of sprayed mud, tiny particles of the stuff, and it almost looks like someone’s tried to wipe all the grot off it before moving on to better things.
Details matter in Snowrunner. They matter because, like Spintires, the origin story of this strange and wonderful series, you have time to notice the details. It’s not that you’re up close as such, but more that the landscape moves past you at about two miles an hour, and that’s when things are going well. This is a game about being stuck right in the moment – often a moment in which you’re stuck, right, in the mud. You get time to see the breeze in the trees, the speckles of the earth, and the smear on the surface of a window.
Spintires! That was a game! Soviet trucks stuck in the earth and often not moving very far at all. If Ridge Racer is all about ghosting around that first air-cushioned curve as a jumbo takes off overhead, Spintires was all about fighting your way up an extremely modest incline and then finding your tires sinking into the mud and moss at the top. Wheels weren’t for moving forward so much as they were for churning you deeper into the ground. It was a driving game about being heavy, about inertia. It was a waft of gritty incense directed at Sisyphus.
Compared to Spintires, Snowrunner, like Mudrunner before it, is practically a radio-friendly unit-shifter. After about a minute of play in the opening Michigan section, I’d actually started moving forward! Moments later, whisper it, there was tarmac under my wheels. Tarmac! I skipped Mudrunner, so Snowrunner came as something of a shock. So forgiving! So eager to please! So ingratiating! Look! I’ve travelled 50 meters without blowing my engine to fragments. It’s only half-ruined!