Snowrunner
240 hours over three years, three months, and three days. That’s how long it took me to 100% complete the base version of Saber Interactive’s Snowrunner. Granted, there were long breaks between sessions and I played on three different platforms, but I finally made the “last” delivery on the Xbox Series X version. I put last in quotes because Saber produced nine more content packages after the original release. But this complete edition retails for over a hundred slippery Canadian dollars and no video game is worth that.
As for the game itself: the reason I found it compelling enough to shirk much of the most important semester of my academic career was that it was teaching me patience. Ever since I was a child my mother felt that I lacked this critical attribute, and tried to instill it by gifting me puzzles, LEGOs, models, and similar toys every XMAS and birthday until I left home. Despite her best efforts, I grew into a man who had a short fuse for most anything that didn’t go my way. This, coupled with an inborn utter disdain for authority, landed me in a lot of trouble. It still does, from time to time, to this day.
But Snowrunner has gone further than most anything I’ve ever done to teach myself patience. Sitting here now, with a resting heart rate of sixty beats per minute and a blasé look smeared down my face, I can attribute this sense of zen to the time spent grinding through mud and snow to make virtual cargo deliveries across the thousands of kilometers of routes in digital Montana, Alaska, and Tamyr. Why this game? Why now? There are fifty years of factors leading to this epiphany, and I honestly can’t put my finger on a definitive reason.
Your mileage is going to figuratively and literally vary on how engaging you find Snowrunner. It requires diligence and perseverance to conquer. But as both therapy and a joy-giving video game experience, this one is going to stay with me for a very long time.
2021.05.18 – 2025.03.09