By Quintin Smith on August 12th, 2010 at 11:47 am.

Sorry I started yesterday with a taxing piece of freeware. Here, let me make up for it with another morsel snatched from the groaning tables of the Indie Games blog- Solipskier is a moreish browser game that sees you earning points by navigating a skier between posts, through tunnels and over jumps. Except you don’t control the skier! Aha! No. You control the landscape, painting it into appropriate slopes with the mouse. The physics can be a little rickety, but the game makes up for it with the moments where you accidentally flick your skier into orbit or throw up a wall for him to collide with. If you want something to shoot for, I managed a score of around 10,000,000. Feel free to embarrass me, you grubby lot.


Snow Crash eh?
I refuse to rise to the bait.
report
But the skier’s name is Hiro Protagonist.
report
Couldn’t get above about 2 million thus far.
report
Oh man this is so good. A little awkward to begin with, but once you hit your flow you won’t ever want your skiier to stop.
Which is why it’s heartbreaking when you cock it up and he plummets to a 500mph death. At least there’s no yeti!
report
11 mil, but i’m sticking with this. This is one of the best browser games I’ve seen
report
27 mil currently. It’s a good game because it makes you desperate for speed. When you’re going fast it’s not only easier to score, but it’s more fun. I think, a lot of games like this make you not want to go fast because it just makes it more likely that you’ll die. Here you absolutely crave it.
report
The grammar and syntax was horrible there because I want to get back to the game
report
6.7 million is my best so far, but i will try harder!
My Name on Kongregate is “Luke91″
post you Kongregate Names here so we can compare :)
report
Kirby’s Power Paintbrush anyone?
report
Am I the only one who thinks this’d be great on a touchscreen? I’d certainly buy it for my iTouch.
report
The death screen has a little mobile icon you can click on to go to the app store page…
report
Chopin at the death screen. Sweet.
report
Man, I suck at this game. I think I’ve got a bit over a million so far. I’m just not very good at making the guy go fast, but yet I CRAVE SPEED SO MUCH that I end up trying to make him do a jump and hitting a wall or something. I am a failure at ski-based landscaping. :(
report
The trick is clearly making gentle direction changes – he only slows on STEEP hills and speeds-up enormously on even a slight downhill.
The ‘canabalt-like’ bad bit is that when you’re flying, stuff comes up too fast. I’m still not really ‘ready’ for jumps – they tend to kill me most often – but it’s a lovely little game.
report
Yeah, what also helps is to keep the landscape very slightly wobbling up and a down, because I think he speeds up on downslopes more than he slows down on upslopes.
only 9mil so far though, so I am hardly the expert on ski-based landscaping.
report
a good trick is to not make high jumps, just stop pressing your mouse key for a second so he ‘jumps’ through the checkpoint things and you will get a nice point boost
i just do really big jumps after tunels
i got to 10m+ with this technique :)
report
Wonderful game. A bit annoyed that jumps aren’t given a distance indicator (they tend to stymie my best efforts by surprise).
report
Bwa, 17mil, I beat Quinns, I can stop. =P
report
It’s out for all iOS devices actually! iPad play is pretty dang awesome, if I say so myself :)
report
I’m so far behind you folks on the score front!
Absolutely love this though – failing and thwumping down through several screens to a death accompanined by dryly amusing ‘ski tips’ still gets guffaws from me. As others have said, the speed is really satisfying and as new-junkie Shazbut implies, highly, highly addictive.
Also, surprisingly polished and aesthetically pretty great; was really impressed when I noticed the trees sprouting violently to life as the slope pops into existence.
Gameplay takeaway for the devs on here has to be: if failing is made to be nearly as fun as succeeding, your player will spend longer enjoying your game.
report
Welll, I don’t think I will be going back to Cannabalt for a while, and I do love that game…
report
22,915,727. And that’ll be all for awhile I think, though I did buy the iPhone version.
Great little game.
report
I got 7 million. I was happy. Checked the high score page out of interest, and number one is 2,036,816,659. He has played it three hundred thousand times though.
report
very cool
report