Or even starting the engine of the vehicle you’re towing, so that it can give you an encouraging nudge up the rear. Or activating diff lock to send power to the wheels that still have traction, rather than spinning the ones that don’t. That might mean tying a cable to a tree and yanking your truck by its nose, providing the momentum needed to get moving again. The game, in essence, is to marshal the forces pulling you down so that they instead push you forward. It’s immediately parsable by anybody who’s chosen to walk on the grassy verge, rather than trudge down a path turned to mush by footfall. Yet interacting with this mess of maths is oddly intuitive. You’ll either be infuriated or mesmerised by the turbid water roiling around your wheels, moving according to the background calculations of some absurdly complicated physics system. Whether or not this new entry is for you will be apparent the moment you put your foot down and fire clods of earth into the air - all the while completely stationary, like a vehicular Wile E. It’s the same that powered Spintires back in 2014, and then MudRunner in 2017, after designer Pavel Zagrebelny joined Saber Interactive, them of World War Z. The cab might have been repainted, but the simulation engine burbling beneath SnowRunner is a familiar one. Can’t go through it? We’ll have to go through it anyway. It’s like a logic-defying twist on the classic children’s book, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt. There’s something about this trade, captured in its most extreme form by SnowRunner, that encourages dogged persistence past the usual bounds of sense, beyond the normal stopping point of patience, toward a zen-like state of obstinance. Power lines are down, too - although that might have more to do with stubborn truck drivers like me attaching winches to them, using their deep roots to pull heavy-duty vehicles from the mud rather than call for recovery. Days of rain have closed the north road out of an already-sleepy Michigan town with rockslides. That’s the problem all over Black River, actually: a recent flood has rendered the soil sodden enough to swallow a car whole. I took my Chevy to the levee, but the levee wasn’t dry.
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