Over the Hill is a more relaxed off-road simulation than SnowRunner, yet it still punishes careless drivers.

Background: Funselektor's Car Game Line Meets Saber's Off-Roading Tradition

Over the Hill is the latest game from vibesy driving enthusiasts Funselektor, the studio behind Art of Rally and Absolute Drift. It offers a chillaxed take on brutal Saber Interactive off-roading sims such as SnowRunner, assembling untamed wildernesses in the cold Canadian hills and the boiling desert of Algeria before handing Mark and Julian the keys to some 4x4s. The review material also credits Funselektor Labs and Rock Paper Shotgun.

Development Process: Early Trails, Upgrades and Simple Driving Rules

Mark begins with a plan to reach the top of a snowy peak in an Unimog-shaped behemoth, a near-indestructible half-lorry/half-jeep loaded with the finest tech the Germans can devise for making short work of any terrain. He expects to use little poles to winch himself up and a jack to put himself back on his wheels, and not repeat a roll down a mountain, with the roof bouncing off rocks like a pebble lobbed down the Grand Canyon. He also wants to avoid wedging helplessly between two stone ledges while the engine roars in futile fury. Too much speed around a bend, however, sends him tumbling off a cliff toward the valley below.

Julian's first challenge trail, informed by many hours of Spintires, SnowRunner, and MudRunner, follows a similar path. Pootling along a lakeside waterfall with too little care, he clips a rocky outcrop and ends up wedged between two rocks, the engine rapidly filling with water. That mistake repeats quite a few times. The joyous bounce of Over the Hill makes fools of all, because Julian keeps picking up speed on mountain trails instead of switching into a lower gear, taking time, or assessing the path before descending. For the most part, failures are not too painful: restarting at a nearby campsite rarely means too long a drive back. When wedged, though, he would prefer more toys, because there is not always a friendly tree nearby to wrap a winch around.

At that point Julian is still using the starting winch, having upgraded the cable length with points earned while exploring most of the starting region, and has not unlocked the jack or poles. Mark explains that investing in more gadget slots is a must as soon as possible. Upgrade points come from discovering objectives while exploring the world and interacting with them, but early play leaves only a single tool slot, so a driver has only one jack or portable winch point before considering a reset to the nearest camp. Buying all gadget slots gives four slots in total. If each tool gets past one obstacle or recovers from one miscalculation, that effectively provides four lives. A fall all the way down a mountain may still force a trip back for repairs.

Despite friendlier vibes than its tougher inspirations, the game keeps players on their toes through mechanical simplicity. Mark says that is what stops Over the Hill from feeling like Driving Dark Souls. Drivers choose a high gear setting to go fast or a low setting to grind up hills without excess wheelspin. There is no shuffling among settings, no remembering to engage locking diffs, and no worrying about running out of fuel before the next stop. Those systems are key to the in-depth simulation sought by the likes of SnowRunner, but removing them lessens the learning curve. It also means a stuck driver is not looking for a solution buried in the vehicle's Haynes manual. That simplicity can mean less time leafing through manuals, though it may also mean less time enjoying scenery before beelining toward the next camp.

Julian enjoys the simplicity in some moments and yearns for complexity in others. He first selected manual transmission to add challenge to what looks like a simple game, but turned it off quickly because it made driving too taxing and broke the zen vibes fostered by the outdoorsy locale. He wonders whether a fuel gauge might give a reason to return to camp occasionally. He also misses a couple of MudRunner steadfasts, such as deformable terrain. Without seeing wheels kick up mud and gouge their way into the earth, there feels like a disconnect between vehicle and terrain, and the lo-fi aesthetic makes that disconnect from the land a little more pronounced.

The chill vibe still invites playful driving. Julian uses the quick winch, which snags the nearest tree in range with a tap of the Y button, like a 4WD Spider-Man or a Spider-Van. He anchors himself to a sapling at the top of a cliff, reverses backwards and extends the cable to lower himself down the precipice. When fully extended, he lets go and clings to trees passed on the way down, using them to slow the fall.

Development Process: Weather, Vehicles and the Das Mammoth Problem

Mark says terrain gets a lot soupier when caught in snowfall on one of the Canada maps, or when wading into the sandy dunes beyond the rocky mesas of the Algeria maps. A couple of times he hits pause or rests at a cabin to let time pass, then returns to find his jeep buried waist-deep in snow. The mud is unquestionably not as treacherous as Saber Interactive's, but the car-flipping and beaching tendencies of angular rocks are just as potent as in any tougher sims.

His concern centers on Das Mammoth. After unlocking the vehicle, he finds it so suited to overcoming most obstacles that he fears he might not tap any other rides for ventures into uncharted territories. There may yet turn out to be narrow paths it proves too bulky for, but so far he has amassed a garage of about eight jeeps from challenge trails that set out checkpoint routes through tricky stretches of landscape, and none seem to match its elite ground clearance. He acquired Das Mammoth via a task fairly deep into the third and hardest to negotiate of the Canada maps, so he may just have lucked into picking up one of the best vehicles relatively quickly.

That criticism is grounded in early hours with old-school Land Rover Defender and Ford Bronco-shaped jeeps, so the classic American pickup and wood-panneled station wagon he has unlocked but not driven much may fare better. A separate frustration is that the game pushes players to try a new car when they unlock it, but upgrades bought cannot be transferred between vehicles. Every fresh addition must be tuned from scratch, leaving Mark reluctant to take new cars on treks into the unknown right away. There are bears out there, after all.

Latest Progress: Steam Deck Trips, Wildlife Photos and Multiplayer Plans

Julian worries he may have sounded a tad negative, but he has really enjoyed pootling about the landscape. After playing Prospice last week, he also likes the fresh abundance of off-road sims of different stripes, whether chill vibes or eldritch limb transport. He praises having something this pick-up-and-put-downable on the Steam Deck. While sat in the office with James' back turned, he can hop in for a brief sojourn into the woods, followed by the office reminder: "Get back to work - James."

He also flags a late discovery: players who plan to load up a 4x4 and head into the wilderness should remember they have a camera, and there are rewards for papping wildlife. Julian realised this late and missed pictures of deer, foxes and all other sorts, leaving him scratching his noggin and trying to remember where he saw them hours after the fact.

Mark understands being drawn in by the desire to dash about discovering places early doors, rather than taking it slow enough to snap wildlife pics or collect meteorites that have not dropped right next to him. Those are pieces of Over the Hill he hopes will keep him going once he begins running out of new areas to chart. He will need something to aim for when he eventually parks Das Mammoth for an extended period and gives the rest of his growing garage a proper run out. The second Algeria map has striking ruins woven into the landscape, so he plans to spend time pointing his camera at those too. He is keen to try multiplayer roving whenever the pair can manage to co-ordinate an hour together, again under James' office reminder.

The review's impression so far is that Over the Hill makes a worthy addition to the off-roading sim pantheon, with enough unique quirks to set it apart from the existing mudpluggers. Funselektor continues trying new, albeit always car-related, things with each new game: a drift game, a rally game, a retro F1 management sim, and now Over the Hill. The question left for readers is where the studio will motor off to next.