Embrace The Trucker Lifestyle
HIGH Sublime physics. Rad trucks. An ocean’s worth of content.
LOW Lots of menu friction. Frustration is part of the game.
WTF Some of the truck stickers are… interesting…
Snowrunner is about hauling heavy materials from one dirty and/or snowy and/or wet place to
another place, likely also dirty and/or snowy and/or wet. It’s also (as of June 2024) one of my most played
games, ever. Neither open-world titans like Elden Ring, nor luxurious JRPGs like Persona 5 or Dragon
Quest XI have taken up even half as much of my time as this contemplative, repetitive masterpiece about
lugging stuff around in big ol’ trucks.
Snowrunner is an open-world driving game which puts players behind the wheel of all sorts of trucks,
then tasks them with making deliveries across a spread of treacherous, wild landscapes — flood-ravaged
Michigan, rural Russia, the snow-entombed outer reaches of Alaska. Each region is comprised of several
interconnected zones. Loading screens separate one zone from another, but players can mostly go
wherever they want, whenever they want.
Activating watchtowers highlights noteworthy things in the immediate vicinity, like quest givers and truck parts, but in Snowrunner, exploration never stops. These maps are dense, and players must continually ferret out safe routes, experiment with shortcuts, and strike off for the far corners in hopes of finding more quests or specialized upgrades. By the end of the tutorial, players will have experienced the loop that’ll define the time that will be spent with Snowrunner, and what a loop it is, with such a rich mechanical texture.
Whenever I play the enormous, triple-A, third-person open-world titles of today, I have this nagging sense of unreality. My screen’s filled with huge, lush-looking worlds, and yet they feel so unconvincing. I can traverse so much ground so quickly, with so little friction. Nothing is simulated, everything is merely a
prop. For my fleet-footed avatar, there’s no meaningful difference between a dirt road and the paved thoroughfares of a city. Physics systems and environmental considerations take a back seat to pure
embellishment, and that’s where these games lose me. Their worlds feel like little more than a few
microns of paint flicked on a flat canvas.
Snowrunner’s compact maps, by contrast, feel thick. They feel old. They feel like they have geologic
history. Powering through a flood-battered road in Michigan, I not only feel the churn of mud under my
wheels, but the compacted stone and dirt beneath that mud. Branches in the road buckle and flip as I
trundle over them. Snow turns to slipperier slurry under my tires, gravel shimmies and spits under my
truck’s weight, sediment-choked river water pushes sluggishly against my cabin as I try to ford a river. It’s
all wonderfully tactile.
Then there are the vehicles themselves. Such beautiful, ungainly monsters, each imbued with heft and
character. The manifold differences between a spry little Scout vehicle that can almost hop from rock to
rock, and a hulking, top-heavy, experimental arctic exploration tractor can be felt distinctly in the way
they navigate these rugged environments.
Snowrunner’s environment and vehicle physics makes believing and spending time in its remote, lonely
worlds nearly effortless. They individuate every single trip taken, imbue every short and long haul with their own moments of drama. Even the most elementary jaunt holds the potential for disaster or, at least,
complication — and that is, actually, also why someone might not love Snowrunner. Its systems purposely induce a sensation of surmountable frustration, not unlike the way horror games use their mechanics to instill fear or discomfort. Emotions we label as ‘negative’ in the broader world can enhance our enjoyment of art, in the context of that art. However, purposeful negativity is not going to work for everybody.
Consider Snowrunner’s first “boss fight” — a muddy field in front of a Michigan farmhouse. Getting into the field isn’t too difficult, but getting out of it with the underpowered early game trucks is A Project. I fought against that farm mud for hours, battling with wheel and winch to gain mere inches on the morass. When I finally rolled my inadequate, mud-spattered truck back onto the tarmac, it felt worthy of an epic poem, at least. I loved it.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, though. I got a friend to try Snowrunner one night after weeks of singing its praises, and I’ll never forget the texture of his frustrated silence over Discord as he struggled in that same mud. And no matter how much of a glutton for Snowrunner’s particular punishments I am, there have been times when the frustration overstepped its bounds. Whether it was a truck that tipped over mere yards away from its destination, an icy canyon that swallowed up three separate vehicles, or an arctic explorer tipping over for the dozenth time, I’ve terminated more than one Snowrunner session out of sheer game-induced pique.
However, this excess frustration is the by-product of the type of thing Snowrunner is trying to do — of the kind of experience it’s trying to be. Without the potential for actual frustration, the moments of triumph and success would lose some of their shine. It all would matter less.
While I’ll defend the mechanical frustrations, nobody should go to bat for Snowrunner’s menu design. The
word “eldritch” comes to mind. Snowrunner sequesters all quests and map info in a series of semi-nested,
often redundant lists. These may be navigable to elder cosmic intelligences, but they inflict only misery and vexation on human minds. After 200 hours of wrangling with Snowrunner’s menus I still forget how they work sometimes. It’s is a complicated game full of nuance and its menu design makes the learning curve even steeper for those new to the Lonesome Trucker Lifestyle.
I mention these downsides out of reviewerly duty, and against my inclination to blindly proselytize,
because on a holistic level, Snowrunner is a real masterpiece. Its beautifully granular physics systems
create not just an atmosphere, but a world in which players can lose themselves for happy hours, hauling
logs and steel beams and slabs of concrete hither and yon. It’s therapeutic, it’s deep, it’s engaging, and it’s indisputably unique. Everyone should try it.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
— Ben Schwartz
Disclosures: This game is developed by Saber Interactive and published by Focus Entertainment. It is
currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via paid
download and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 180 hours of play were devoted to the single-player
mode, and the game was not completed. 20 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E with no listed content descriptors. The official
description reads: “This is an off-road driving simulation game in which players can drive a variety of
trucks across natural snowy, rocky, and muddy terrain. Players can monitor fuel usage and install modules
(e.g., winches, chains, log carts, trailers) as needed.” The entire game is spent in a truck which can be
damaged, but no harm comes to the player character. There is no combat or violence of any sort.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles. However, there is no spoken
dialogue, everything ‘plot-related’ is conveyed through text in the menus (the text cannot be resized). All
relevant meters are displayed on screen at all times, and context-sensitive prompts are displayed when
necessary. I’d say it’s fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. Keyboard + Mouse and Steering Wheel inputs
are fully remappable, while controllers can only be remapped into four different preset configurations,
with added universal options for swapping the left and right trigger functions, inverting the Y axis, and
adjusting the right stick sensitivity.
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