Laya’s Horizon: Take to the skies in a zen-like iPhone adventure
Some games demand exacting care and utmost concentration. Let your mind wander when you’re playing Elden Ring or Hollow Knight or Overwatch and you’re likely to receive a message telling you you’ve been killed in some horrible way.
Other games benefit from a disconnect between the player and the game, inducing a “flow state” in which your conscious mind takes a back seat and your primitive lizard brain takes the reins, a sensation not unlike meditation.
Few games have nailed this quite like 2015’s Alto’s Adventure and its sequel Alto’s Odyssey; in these mobile-first titles (they were available on other platforms but designed with an iPhone in mind) you controlled a snowboarder on an endlessly scrolling 2D adventure, tearing down mountains, grinding on strings of bunting and bouncing off balloons.
Now developer Snowman has taken this idea into the third dimension with the quasi open-world Laya’s Horizon, in which you play a wing-suited woman gliding from a mountaintop across a beautiful and diverse island.
You control her by moving your thumbs to adjust her arms, tilting left or right, pulling up or entering a joyous nosedive. Gravity means your journeys inevitably lead downwards, past cell-shaded mining towns and canyons and fishing villages. Each run lasts a matter of minutes, at which point your momentum wanes and you parachute to the ground (or crash into a cliff).
Exploring the skies of this surprisingly large place is both relaxing and thrilling, tapping into the same satisfying momentum as Alto’s Adventure but introducing limitless choice over your direction of travel. As you mooch about you’ll meet islanders who challenge you to beat them in races or follow them through a series of rings or chase some local wildlife, and a stream of mini-challenges (“fly close to the ground for 200m”, for instance) will reward you with new capes with special abilities or trinkets that give you a minor boost.
But Laya’s Horizon is really all about the zen-like sensation of soaring through clear blue skies, making it the perfect antidote to a morning commute.