Fresh Tracks

Skiing is a flow-state activity by nature – with the rush of the air as you fly down the slopes and the rhythmic side-to-side movements, it’s easy to block everything else out. Or at least that’s what I assume – I’m in my mid-30s, I live in a region with zero elevation change, and my priorities in life have shifted pretty far in the direction of keeping my knees and ankles intact. Luckily for me and those of you who can relate, indie studio Buffalo Buffalo has arrived on the scene with their music-based skiing rhythm game, Fresh Tracks.

In Fresh Tracks, you play as Skaii, who sets out on their skis to journey through the mythical, musical land of Norwyn. In each level, Skaii automatically moves through the course, leaving you to avoid or smash any obstacles or enemies that stand in their way, all to the rhythm of that level’s story song. As you might hope with a rhythm game, the soundtrack is a bop, full of diverse and fun tunes – you’ll dodge dancing warriors in the musical theatre tune “Hit Your Mark”, slash enemies and swat arrows back to their senders to Scandinavian power metal in “The Battle of the Kor”, and glide under the lights of the aurora to the R&B pop beats of “Ekkos”.

In an interview I did with a few Buffalo Buffalo team members, they mentioned that the soundtrack was one of the foundational pieces that the rest of the game was built around, and it’s easy to see that as you seemingly follow instructions from the lyrics of several songs or swing your sword at trees blocking your path to the wild rhythms of a drum solo. When you’re in the pocket, you’re one with the songs, jumping to the beat of the kick drum, smashing obstacles with your sword to match the snare and weaving between obstacles as a guitar goes on a run. However, a combination of an underbaked roguelite structure and increasing difficulty ultimately pushed me out of the groove for good.

Skaii’s journey is full of branching paths, represented by a choice of three songs of varying difficulty and often varying rewards. Every three nodes is a boss track, where you’ll meet a new Mythic character. If you are able to complete that boss track, that Mythic will join Skaii for the rest of their journey. If you fail a song, you’re sent back to the beginning to customise Skaii’s skis, pick which Mythic will accompany you this time and maybe purchase a consumable item. In order to complete the game, you’ll need to make it to the end of each journey one time with each Mythic. However, completing a journey is much easier said than done.

A roguelite structure is as recognisable as any in modern gaming, especially in indie games, designed to give players a sense of steady progression against overwhelming odds, both via accumulation of knowledge and increasing avatar strength. Play, fail, regroup and prepare, play again, so on and so on. The repeated runs you make in Fresh Tracks fit into this structure but do not benefit from it. From a mechanical perspective, I usually have enough Whispers (currency that resets upon failing a run) to buy out the merchant’s shop, so I am rarely making interesting decisions about what to buy. I also have hundreds of Ekkos (currency that is persistent across runs), but very rarely anything to buy with them beyond one extremely cheap consumable item. This abundance of Ekkos tells me that either I’m terrible at the game and have done way more levels than intended, the game economy is poorly balanced, or a secret third answer (both). The answer is probably a combination of both, but more on that in a bit.

Different Mythics, weapons and skis have different attributes, but none that drastically change the feeling of a run, beyond each Mythic generally representing a different level of difficulty.  The other differences are slight, e.g., I can take 7 hits instead of 6, or imperceptible at worst, like just trusting the game that increasing my invulnerability period after taking damage actually does what it promises. The best roguelites take the sting out of failing a run by presenting you tangible ways to feel like the next run will be better, and the system’s side of the roguelite structure makes every run feel like it’s starting from the same place. It’s a bummer to fail a run and look at my enormous stockpile of Ekkos with nothing interesting to spend them on. Roguelikes and roguelites are designed to get players into a go-with-the-flow mentality and introduce variety into each run, whereas here I felt that the best course of action was always to prioritise healing, since the late game is incredibly difficult.

Across Skaii’s many attempted journeys, you will inevitably play the same songs many times, so learning is another form of progression. The goal is to become so familiar with the songs that you will more easily slide into the groove and overcome the increasing challenge of each journey. However, this is another area where the roguelite structure betrays an intended form of progression. If I’m stuck on a boss track 6 songs into a journey, I still need to play several songs before I can try that boss track again, even with the benefit of unlockable shortcuts on the map. I can practise any song I’ve played back at the pre-run preparation stage, but I still need to wait 10-20 minutes until I reach that track again to make another “real” attempt.

And unfortunately, the longer I played, the distinction between learning a song and learning a level began to take centre stage. I could probably sing the entirety of the musical show tune “Hit Your Mark” for you right now, but that does not mean I can execute the level with anything approaching perfection. Knowing the beat, knowing the lyrics or even knowing the musical flourishes will only get you so far when the combination of dodges, dips, ducks, leans, jumps and swings approaches its most difficult. Fresh Tracks is a beautiful game with a consistent visual language for what needs to be done, but the more complex stages lose the consistent pairing of stage obstacles and song elements that I mentioned earlier in the review and, in my experience, become nearly unreadable at higher speeds. 

Contrast this with other song-based rhythm games like Guitar Hero, where learning a song *is* learning the level. If you know the guitar part to “Carry On My Wayward Son” by heart, it’s just up to your hands to do the rest. In later stages in Fresh Tracks, in songs that I could recall from memory, I looked at an oncoming barrage of moving obstacles like a deer in the headlights, unable to mentally connect them to the corresponding part of the song nor identify and navigate a safe path through. And after failing a run, the knowledge that roughly 15-20 minutes of other songs stood between me and a repeated attempt at the song that knocked me out was very demoralising and led to me giving up on completing the game’s fourth and (possibly) final run. I know the songs by heart at this point, but that’s not even close to enough. By the time I reached my breaking point, the intended flow state was really only possible in the easier songs, while the harder songs were an inscrutable challenge that not even the lowest difficulty mode could clear up.