Driftwood Preview (PC): Powersliding Through Gorgeous Landscapes

However, that doesn’t mean that Driftwood isn’t a relaxing game. In fact, it cannot not be relaxing considering that the main protagonist is a … sloth. Driftwood is about Eddy, a cool sloth who loves skateboarding, and beautiful scenery.

There’s no actual competing in Driftwood, unless you count the online leaderboard that shows the best scores players manage to achieve. While the full version of the game hasn’t yet been released, the Early Access version offers access to 4 levels, which are pretty definitory for the gameplay loop.

Driftwood’s aesthetic resembles that of the other game that I mentioned earlier, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and the same goes for the minimalist experience. Without a story campaign, Driftwood fully focuses on a minimalist experience where you simply skate through gorgeous landscapes.

Depending on how well you fare during these levels, you’ll eventually be able to unlock new boards, wheels, and even clothes, which are meant to keep you engaged with the game. It’s the clear definition of “minimalist experience,” one that puts relaxation in front of the competition.

Make no mistake though, Driftwood is not a walk in the park, and you don’t learn to control your speed, you’ll quickly end up in the ditch. On the bright side, the game lets you respawn relatively close to the point of crash, but you can always choose to start over if you’re worried about your score.

Speaking of score, speed is not the only thing that counts in Driftwood. The number and complexity of tricks you can pull, as well as how close to cars you’re avoiding, and even how many leaves you involve in your tricks.

Avoiding collisions with any of the occasional cars on the road at the last moment will give you extra points, but speed and distance matter too. Obviously, the game wouldn’t be called Driftwood if you couldn’t drift. In fact, this is a very important move that can be a great start for a combo trick. Learning how to control a drift isn’t that hard, but also knowing every track’s curve helps a lot. Of course, all these don’t matter at all if you’re just here to skate and relax.

Skating in Driftwood feels liberating, especially if you kill the soundtrack and put your own music. Fair warning though, the music in this particular game is pretty good, so you’ll probably want to change it only after you’re bored of it.

Now, there aren’t too many mechanics to make use of in the game, but it’s important to lean forward if you want to increase your speed and raise your arms up to slow down a bit. There are a couple neat tricks that you can use to make the experience even more authentic, although not all are explained in the rather short tutorial.

Powersliding and executing certain types of tricks is left for players to figure out. Using the left and right triggers on the controller usually does different things depending on the timing. The sliding mechanic requires quite a lot of finesse, but not even that can help you if you don’t understand how it works in the game.

Although the game barely touches the mechanic in the tutorial, it definitely requires a more in-depth explanation since it’s so important for those who skate.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many poses available in the game, which is kind of disappointing for a skating game. However, considering that this is still in beta, it’s probably going to gain a lot of new features throughout the development process.

The only other minor issue I had with the game is the rather wonky camera. If you suffer from motion sickness, I definitely recommend not playing Driftwood, although chances are that skating games are not on your list of must-play games if they cause nausea.

Conclusion

Driftwood feels like a pretty relaxing skating game, which could be even better with a few more features added. Despite some of the issues that I mentioned, I’m pretty impressed with the overall gameplay experience. I confess though, it took me a while to figure out how to correctly execute some of the slides and tricks.

Since it’s being developed by a two-person team, I think the studio will have to prioritize what features to add to the game because the game will have to be released fully at some point in the near future. If you’re looking for a pretty close in-real life skating experience, Driftwood does offer some of that. The game has just entered Early Access on Steam and it’s very cheap.