Alto's Odyssey

Review of the video game Alto’s Odyssey for iOS by Team Alto and Snowman. Soothing infinite scroller where you play a desert sand surfer collecting coins, doing backflips, and other tricks.
2021-07-23 – ⁠2023-10-01 finishedSource published on: 2018

You’re a surfer sliding down slopes in the desert. You gain points by doing backflips and other tricks. You can buy power-ups using picked-up coins. You level up across runs by hitting milestones like “do two backflips in one run”.

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I enjoyed the experience until I unlocked the first two hidden characters. Then I read online that the best character is the last one you unlock and my mind started telling me to rush through the runs so that I could get the final character. Because you need to complete a lot of milestones to get to the last character, and those milestones felt like more of the same, it felt pointless to play and I uninstalled it.