Hill Rider — a free one-finger hill riding game in your browser

Hill Rider gives you a single button and a landscape that never stops. Holding makes your rider heavier, and heavier means two different things depending on where you are. In the air it is a dive: you fall three times as hard, so you hit the next downslope carrying far more speed than you left the crest with. On the ground it mostly welds you to the hillside, which is the opposite of what you want at a crest. Let go there and you launch. Get that rhythm right and every hill hands you speed for free. Get it wrong and you drop onto a rising face, lose most of your speed in one thud, and hear the storm behind you get closer.

There is only one way to lose: the storm front rolling in from behind swallows you. It never slows down and it speeds up the longer you last, so every run ends and the only question is how far you got. The hills grow taller and tighter as you go, which makes the same trick pay more and cost more. It is free, runs in any browser with no download, and works with one thumb on a phone or the space bar on a desktop.

How to play

• Hold anywhere on the stage — or hold Space — to get heavy. Let go to get light. That is the entire control scheme.
• Hold on the way down. In the air that is a dive at roughly triple gravity, and it is where all of your speed comes from.
• Let go on the way up, and especially at a crest — a light rider takes off, a heavy one stays stuck to the ground.
• Land flat. Coming down roughly along the hillside is a SMOOTH landing: you keep your speed and start a chain that pays a little extra each time.
• Slamming into a rising face scrubs half your speed or more, and you will see exactly how much you lost.
• Your longest flight of the run is recorded beside your score.
• Your score is the distance you covered, in metres, before the storm reached you.

Why pumping a hill gives you free speed

Nothing in Hill Rider pushes you forward. There is no throttle and no boost pad — the only thing you control is how heavy you are, and the hills do the rest. That is a real effect, and it is the same one a skateboarder uses in a bowl and a child uses on a swing. Falling and then climbing through the same height gains you nothing, because whatever the drop pays out the climb takes straight back. Energy appears when you change the rules between the two halves: fall while heavy, climb while light, and the books stop balancing. The descent pays you at the heavy rate and the climb charges you at the light one, and the difference is yours to keep.

That is why holding the button forever is not a shortcut, and it is worth understanding rather than discovering the slow way. A rider who is heavy all the time gains nothing per hill — the extra weight on the descent is handed straight back on the climb — and, worse, never gets light enough to leave a crest. Staying welded to the ground means travelling the full length of every slope instead of cutting across the gap, and it means paying friction the whole way. Measured against the same storm, a rider who holds the button from start to finish covers about 290 metres — the worst of any strategy, worse than never pressing it at all. Letting go on the climbs is worth 500 to 700. Reading a hill ahead and using the air is worth over 2000.

The ceiling is set by drag. Every hill adds energy and drag removes a share of it that grows with the square of your speed, so there is a pace the terrain will not carry you past no matter how well you ride. That is precisely why the storm keeps getting faster rather than settling at an honest speed — if it did not, a good enough rider would simply never be caught, and a run would never end.

More games

Try Rage Climb or Dino Run, and for the other kind of momentum game there is Rope Swing. Or browse all games.