Descenders — Snap Judgement #5
A mildly thrilling mountain biking…rogue-like?
Time played: Probably just over two hours across three sessions. I only made it halfway through the second set of levels, but I completed the first set a couple times.
Calling something a “rogue-like” is always a tricky proposition. The term was created to describe games that were stylistically derived from 1980’s Rogue, a seminal RPG noted for its use of procedurally generated levels. But now the definition has expanded to encompass many different game design elements, and there’s no set rubric for how many of those elements a game needs to have before you can call it a rogue-like. Most rogue-likes involve exploring a Dungeons and Dragons-esque world, so what do you call a game that has lots of rogue-like elements but is, for example, an off-road cycling simulation?
Dutch studio Rage Squid decided to call that game Descenders and released it in May 2019. On the surface, Descenders looks like a fairly standard off-road cycling simulation, but it’s biggest selling point is that all the tracks you bike down are procedurally generated (just like the levels in Rogue,) meaning that they are created by an algorithm that mixes randomness within certain parameters every time you start a run. Every time you play, you’ll encounter new courses with unique turns, drops, and jumps.
Procedurally generated courses are just one element of Descenders’ rouge-like-ness. The game’s levels are arranged in a web that you have to navigate, similar to what you’d find in FTL. Each node has a brief description and a bar graph that indicates the prevalence of “steepness,” “curves,” and “stunts” on that track. The game also features a version of perma-death, the brutal game design technique that forces you to start the entire game over again when you run out of lives. In Descenders you have four lives, and you lose one whenever you wipeout. Lose all four lives and it’s back to the beginning of the first level.
But aside from all of this rogue-like stuff, how does it feel to actually descend in Descenders? Exhilarating, for the most part. It’s very easy to quickly build up speed on most tracks and zip over ramps and through turns. But if you build up too much speed, you’ll lose control and find yourself running off the course. Luckily there’s no penalty for leaving the track, so you can easily recover and get back on course. Or, if you want, you can zip straight to the finish like the line through a dollar sign. Sometimes you’ll need to do that just to stay alive or complete an objective.
After getting acquainted with the controls, I realized the game’s physics are fairly springy and forgiving. If you’re playing it safe, it’s almost always easy to get to the finish line without losing any lives. Your cyclist seems to want to stay vertical, which is nice (and accurate to the gyroscopic motion of the bike’s wheels, I suppose,) but it means that you’re never really carving up the course and wrestling with gravity. There are ways to kick the back of your bike out and slide through a turn, but your rider seems to instantly spring back into their normal riding position. I’ve seen comments comparing the game to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and I think the way the characters move in such an effortless way might be the biggest similarity between the two.
Although the game prides itself on its procedurally generated levels, I found that many runs felt very samey. I’m sure from a macro, birds eye view each track would appear radically different, but from your perspective on the ground, each track is just a string of the same few obstacles arranged in different orders with different lengths between them. Some obstacles, like the wooden ramps with rocks in between, seemed impossible to leap, and I began to wonder if, because the track was designed by a computer instead of a human, it was somehow glitched. I don’t know if the repetitiveness of a few hand-designed tracks would’ve been more enjoyable the the variety of infinite procedurally generated ones, but I am curious.
Overall though, Descenders delivers on its basic promise of being an exciting cycle down a procedurally generated mountain. It’s arcade-y feel and peculiar procedural proclivities don’t hold it back from being an enjoyable challenge. Once I got into the rhythm of the mountain trails and the uninterrupted techno soundtrack began to grow on me, I did begin to feel a little hooked. In the end, it sort of reminded me of what it was first like to ride a bike as a kid. Once you get moving and you begin to feel that wind rushing by you as you propel yourself faster and faster, all you want to do is ride.
