Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands

My Saturday night co-op crew laughed for a solid ten minutes when I told them the next game night pick was a skiing sim from a two-person studio. Then someone launched a snowball at someone else mid-race, and suddenly nobody wanted to put the controllers down. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands is a top-down, almost isometric open-world ski and snowboard game built around exploration first and competition second. You pick skis or a snowboard at the start, drop onto a mountain, and the whole resort sprawls out beneath you like a tiny snow globe waiting to be cracked open. The progression loop is satisfying in a low-pressure kind of way. Each of the twelve mountains starts with your lift passes locked, and you earn them by completing challenges scattered across the slopes: Super G races, Slopestyle runs, Big Air events, time trials, and hidden secret trials tucked away in backcountry areas and deep forests. Find enough passes and the chairlifts open up, pushing you higher and into new terrain. There is no story, no urgency, and that is genuinely the point. If you want to skip all of that and just carve turns through a mountain-side village at your own pace, Zen Mode strips out every challenge, every timer, and every NPC, leaving just you and the snow. It is surprisingly meditative, though it does go a bit stale if that is all you do. The controls have one real learning curve worth flagging for new players: the camera sits behind and above your character, which means your directional input is relative to the screen, not the slope. Moving the stick left sends your skier screen-left, but because they are pointing downhill, that actually translates into a rightward turn on the mountain. It clicks eventually, but there is no control remapping to ease the transition, and the auto-adjusting camera occasionally swings to an unhelpful angle during fast challenge runs, costing you gates you could not see coming. Precision players and completionists will hit a frustration ceiling well before casual riders do. For the couch multiplayer question, the answer is: yes, with one important asterisk. Up to four players can race, snowball-fight, or cruise the mountains together locally, and that mode is genuinely fun. The asterisk is that multiplayer pulls from content already unlocked in single-player, so if you buy this specifically to drop four players in cold without any solo groundwork, some mountains will be off-limits. Worth knowing before you set up the tournament bracket. Once you have a few mountains open, though, the four-player races are scrappy and chaotic in all the right ways. No wheel or HOTAS needed here - a standard gamepad is the ideal input, and the controls translate well to any layout. Steam Deck players report it runs without fuss, too. The visuals punch above the budget with a tilt-shift, miniature-world aesthetic, dynamic snow tracks that form wherever you ride, and wildlife dotting the forests. The ambient soundtrack, all distant piano and soft electronic pulses, does the heavy lifting for atmosphere and is a long way from the nu-metal energy of older snowboarding games. If your crew wants loud chaos, this is not your game. If someone in the group needs a palette cleanser after a week of shooters, or if you just want something that four people aged eight to eighty can genuinely enjoy together on a screen, Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands delivers that without fuss.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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