Tricky Madness is a Love Letter to Snowboarding Games of the Early 2000s

In the best example of "how it started, how it's going", Tricky Madness from solo developer, Nathan Dearth, is the culmination of decades of waiting to see if someone, anyone, could recapture the magic of the myriad arcade snowboarding titles during the first true 'next-gen' boom of the early 2000s. And upon a single viewing of the game's Early Access Trailer, it's is abundantly clear the true north star for Dearth here is EA's SSX series. Take a gander:

Hitting Early Access on Steam (with a demo available right now) from November 15, Tricky Madness will ship with eight unique, standalone maps. Each full of shortcuts, secrets and winding paths to uncover, making for a huge amount of replayability. A Campaign mode also serves up an open-world map also replete with hidden goodies and a huge amount of exploration. All of this will be played across three key Game Modes in Freestyle, Time Trials and Races.

While our press release boasts "modern graphics" we're more inclined to suggest high-res representation of the original aesthetic of the time period in which this love letter is built, but that just makes it all the more charming. It also looks fast and an "Enhanced Tricking Points System" prompts players to trick more often as that's where you get your boosts and goes towards unlocking "Wicked Tricks" and "Grinds".

This is definitely one we're super keen on, having been obsessed with games like SSX and 1080° back in the day, and also coming from a real-world snowboarding base ourselves. Check out a bunch of screens in our image carousel below.