Most games built around driving are gas-guzzling, high-octane adventures where speed and destruction sit at the centre of the experience. Funny enough, they’re also the type of game I gravitate towards once in a while to wind down after a long day of work. With their newest title, Over the Hill, Funselector takes a different approach, building a cosy game centred around driving. This isn’t the first time they’ve thought outside the box with cars: their past games, Golden Lap, Art of Rally and Absolute Drift, all took a racing mechanic and stylised it to the max. So what’s the topic this time around? Off-road, four-wheel driving…
Zen state
But what’s so special about Over the Hill? Well, it isn’t a racing game; it’s a cosy game where your car is mainly a way to explore different sandbox environments. You start out in a typical North American forest landscape, but there are also deserts, mountain glaciers, winter landscapes and other maps to discover. All of them can be explored alone, or together on an off-road trip with up to three friends.
When you open the game for the first time, you get some simple driving lessons that show you the ropes. Your instructor is none other than the Buddha himself, who teaches you the basics of shifting into four-wheel drive and operating the on-board winch. After this slightly comedic introduction, the world opens up, and you can explore at your own pace. No goal is mandatory; you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Just remember your Buddhist teachings.
Picture perfect
Asking a player to just sit back and relax after a tutorial is easier said than done. The right tone needs to be set, and Over the Hill delivers beautifully. I would describe the visual art style as cartoony and simplistic, yet it manages to form some jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery from it. The first time I drove up a hill and looked out over a valley, it simply took my breath away. An additional benefit is that you don’t need an extremely powerful device to be blown away: a powerful PC would certainly enhance the experience, but my trusty Steam Deck was just as good at pulling me into the wilderness. The subtle soundtrack, combined with the natural sounds and the humming of my engine, glued me to the screen. I felt teleported away from the stuffy hotel room I was playing in, to a dimly lit outdoor camping site. If I’d had a cup of tea on my bedside table, it would have been the perfect scenario to enjoy the drive.
Driving oozes style too, because you can make your preferred ATV truly your own. Different colorways, vehicle types, and cosmetics let you turn your car into a true fashion statement. My Jeep quickly changed from a stock orange vehicle into a navy blue model with two kayaks on the roof and a silly horn. After a while, it isn’t just a car but it’s a symbol that reflects your personality.
Back to mud
And this isn’t the only aspect that made me feel like I was in an actual forest. The gameplay also adds to the illusion of driving an ATV in the ’80s. Scattered along your drive from cabin to cabin are challenges and tasks where you can test your skills or uncover new vehicles and cosmetics.
For starters, crates are hidden all over the overworld, accentuated with a question mark on the world map when you get close enough. Sometimes you’ll even spot crashed vehicles you can unlock for yourself if you can successfully tow them back to the nearest cabin.
On the road, you’ll also encounter animals you can photograph and add to a scrapbook. Find every species living in a biome, and you’ll even unlock something neat. Last but not least, if you’ve had enough rest and relaxation, there are some genuinely challenging roads to tackle, a way to put all the technical driving skills you learned while hunting for that last animal to the test.
Need for speed
I had a good time exploring Over the Hill, even without friends to play with during this review. The world felt truly open and lived-in, aside from some minor issues. At one point, I wanted to take a picture of a fox and accidentally parked on top of it; it simply walked out from under my vehicle and carried on. I’m not asking for the ability to murder innocent animals, but if the fox had dodged and run away, it wouldn’t have broken the immersion for me.
A bigger issue was the terrain: as difficulty increased, it mostly just felt slippery, rather than meaningfully different across biomes. Taking my time on the first map as an example: off the main dirt track I found slippery rocks, slippery mountainsides and slippery riverbanks, all more or less alike. I have no real-world off-roading experience, so maybe this is accurate, but scaling the top of a mountain still required some thinking, braking, shifting and positioning, and as the difficulty ramped up, the cosiness sometimes got lost for me. I may be a weird outlier, but for me a normal racing game, where I can free-ride full throttle on an asphalt track, is still my preferred way of calming down after a stressful day.
Conclusion
Over the Hill is a fun, cosy driving sim that takes you to wonderfully designed overworlds. The visual and audio design made me feel like I was exploring these places in real life, immersing me fully. A few minor animal interactions broke the spell, but the design itself is truly breathtaking.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is varied, with a plethora of unlockables and challenges, though it can feel a bit one-note. Terrains are a touch too similar and too slippery. And it may just be personal taste, but I’d still pick asphalt over dirt tracks and sprawling landscapes to wind down after a stressful day at work.