SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding launches on Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox

Studio Gauntlet and publisher AMATA Games have launched the console ports of the endless downhill skiing game SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding across Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. First announced back on October 7, the console release is accompanied by a two-week 20% promotional discount on the Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, though Sony's storefront restricts that deal to PlayStation Plus subscribers.

Standard pricing lands at $13.99 in the United States, while Japanese digital storefronts list it at 1,600 yen on the Switch 2 and 1,650 yen on both PS5 and Xbox. Xbox owners are paying full cover charge right out of the gate, which feels like an odd way to welcome a third of the console audience to the mountain.

From space monkeys to procedural powder

Before building an infinite alpine simulator, the two-person Norwegian team at Studio Gauntlet made Bonkies in 2021, a cooperative party game about monkeys constructing dubious structures in space. Trading clumsy zero-gravity physics for solitary, high-speed downhill skiing is quite a pivot, even if both projects rely heavily on momentum and physics systems that can punish a bad angle in half a second. SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding originally hit PC via Steam on February 17, 2025, where it quietly earned an "Overwhelmingly Positive" user rating.

Tokyo-based AMATA Games, the publishing arm of VR and indie studio AMATA K.K. (known for Last Labyrinth and The Tale of Onogoro), stepped in to handle the global console adaptation and distribution. The port targets 60+ frames per second and carries over the PC version's core features, including cross-platform leaderboards, multiple camera angles (spanning third-person, first-person, and a following drone view), and sixteen supported languages. That localization list covers both Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk, because a Norwegian studio wasn't going to cut corners on its own dialects.

Near misses and seeded mountains

Instead of hand-crafted courses, the game uses procedural generation to spit out endless mountains. Every slope is tied to a specific seed code, so if you stumble across a particularly nasty run of cliffs and pine trees, you can share that code with friends to see who survives it longest. Players can ride down on standard skis, a snowboard, or a sit-ski, unlocking new cosmetic skins as their skill rating climbs.

Scoring revolves around aerial tricks and shaving as close to rocks and trees as humanly possible without eating snow. It sits in the same meditative, fast-restart pocket of the genre as Lonely Mountains: Downhill or Shredders, where the whole loop is about chasing a clean line until your thumbs give out. I'm curious how readable the tree line stays in the first-person camera view once you hit top speed on a television across the living room.

If chasing high scores starts feeling too stressful, there's also a score-free Zen mode that strips out the points entirely and just lets you carve down the mountain indefinitely.