Developer Megagon Industries' wonderfully serene (and deliciously infuriating) mountain bike adventure Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a brilliant thing, but given that it's also a year and a half old now, fans may be hoping for a bit of a shake-up. And what do you know? Megagon's newest update is here to do just that, wafting away the threat of encroaching staleness with a range of new Daily Ride challenge modifiers.

Daily Rides, if you've not yet checked them out, are daily cross-platform leaderboards that challenge players to do their best in a randomly selected trial, with participants able to unlock various cosmetic rewards, refreshed each season, along the way. Today's update marks the start of Lonely Mountains' seventh season, Summer Strolls, and introduces those aforementioned modifiers to freshen things up for players.

Today's Daily Ride, for instance, rolls out the new Changed Checkpoints modifier - which, as its name suggests, changes and adds new checkpoints to the trail - but future modifiers for the season have also been revealed (and you can see a few of them in the trailer below).

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Lonely Mountain: Downhill's first paid DLC expansion, Eldfjall, is coming to Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and PC, next Thursday, 22nd October; it'll be accompanied by a free new seasonal Daily Rides feature for all players, initially bringing spookily themed rewards for Halloween.

Starting with Eldfjall, it introduces a new island map featuring an additional four leaderboard-enabled trails of serene/infuriating downhill bikery, complete with their own challenges and resting spots. This time, however, the elements won't be quite so hospitable, with players needing to navigate through the likes of thunderstorms and an erupting volcano.

Developer Megagon Industries is also throwing in new unlockable outfits, helmets, and paint jobs, new unlockable backpacks, and the pro helmet for use with existing outfits. All that will cost $5.99 USD (around £4.60) when it launches on 22nd October.

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Developer Megagon Industries' wonderfully serene (and devilishly infuriating) mountain bike adventure Lonely Mountains: Downhill will be peddling its way to more perilous climes soon, courtesy of its newly announced Eldfjall Island paid expansion.

Eldfjall Island takes the compelling, frequently zen-like, route-finding and time-tweaking core of Lonely Mountain: Downhill's base game and transplants it to a deadly new setting. Here, players can tackle four new trails, which spice things up with the likes of thunderstorms and an erupting volcano, and introduce their own challenges and resting spots.

Additionally, Megagon promises more unlockable outfits, helmets, and paint jobs (plus a new pro helmet), and there are unlockable backpacks this time too.

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Developer Megagon Industries' wonderfully serene (and devilishly infuriating) mountain bike adventure Lonely Mountains: Downhill will be peddling its way to more perilous climes soon, courtesy of its newly announced Eldfjall Island DLC.

Eldfjall Island takes the compelling, zen-like core route-finding and time-tweaking experience of Lonely Mountain: Downhill's base game, and transplants it to a dangerous new setting.

In total, Eldfjall Island introduces four new trails to tackle - which spice up the game's superb exploratory bike action with the likes of thunderstorms and an erupting volcano - each with accompanying challenges and resting spots.

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Up Close is a new, occasional and informal series here on Eurogamer, looking at the smaller points in games in greater amounts of depth. Covering anything from a single mechanic to a reoccurring theme, in praise or criticism, the aim is simply to look a little closer at the things that deserve our attention.

Increasingly, games are looking to the environment to tell their stories. It's easy enough to see why. On one side the natural world is moving closer and closer to the centre of our thought, as the climate crisis becomes more urgent and less easy to ignore. On the other, it becomes a great device for telling a story of impending, existential disaster - or indeed one of the hope to be found in the aftermath. And, above all, pretty environments sell.

But alongside the rise of environmentally aware games is a little micro-surge of environmentally conscious ones. Which is to say, games that are less about the environment as they are about that way you think about it, the connection that forms between your mind and the world around you. Metaphysics, basically, or mindfulness, if we want to narrow it down further. In particular I'm thinking of a couple of mindfulness games from the end of last year, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and A Short Hike, which both look to use the natural world to turn your own gaze inwards, and both happen to use mountains - specifically going either up a mountain or down one, although there aren't many other things to do with mountains in fairness - to achieve the kind of effect I think they're after.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.

Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now!

Today's Five of the Best is...

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

Sometimes, playing Lonely Mountains: Downhill, I can't help but think the aim of the game is to stop playing it. On the surface this is a game about going downhill fast, about beating the clock, cutting corners, sprinting. The race to the finish often ends in a rush of relief, above all, that you've made it there intact. And then at the same time it's the absolute opposite: tranquility, calm, an invitation to stay a while and just listen. At once you're baited into crashing through it and challenged into slowing down for a ponder.

I could, honestly, leave it there. Lonely Mountains' tug-of-war between styles of play is enough in itself, the game a clever little buried lede of one kinetic, mechanical thing on the surface (timers, challenges, sprint buttons, checkpoints) and another, more contemplative, just beneath (crunching leaves, branching paths, hidden oases with fallen trunks to sit on and views to be quietly taken in). But there is so, so much more going on here. Lonely Mountains is, above all, a game about experience - about the act of experiencing, in fact - and played through that lens it's not just clever, it's divine.

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Brilliant indie biking game Lonely Mountains: Downhill has announced a festive event for the holiday season - and if you haven't played it yet, now's a good time to quickly tell you why.

Imagine a semi-open world Trials Evolution game on a constant downhill slope festooned with boulders, jumps, split paths and whole other routes to find. The only sounds while you play are your wheels on the loose stones, the wind and passing birdsong. It's wonderfully relaxing - with that Trials instant-retry mechanic should you mess up.

Well, now it has Christmas trees and presents to open in exchange for festive outfits:

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