- Primary Subject: Over the Hill (Steam Next Fest Demo)
- Key Update: Funselektor and Strelka Games have released a playable co-operative demo of their off-road exploration title set in the Emerald Lake region for Steam Next Fest.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: June 24, 2026
- Quick Answer: The Over the Hill Steam Next Fest demo lets players explore the scenic Emerald Lake wilderness in Canada with up to three friends in off-road vehicles.
Funselektor has a track record most indie studios would kill for.
The Vancouver-based team started with Absolute Drift in 2015, graduated to art of rally, which became something of a cult classic in the sim-adjacent space, then pivoted completely with Golden Lap in 2024, a motorsport management title that showed they weren't content to stay in one lane.
Over the Hill is their fourth game, developed alongside Strelka Games, and after spending time with the Steam Next Fest demo set in the Emerald Lake area of the Canada region, it's already one of my most-watched upcoming releases.
Don't Call It the PEAK of Driving Games (Even Though You're Thinking It)
I'll be honest: I'm not a fan of the "[blank] but [different thing]" comparison game. Not every open world is "the Dark Souls of exploration," and not every co-op release needs to be measured against Lethal Company's chaos or Payday 2’s community.
That said, if someone made me do it: this is PEAK with cars. I mean that genuinely, and I mean it as a compliment.
The same wandering curiosity, the same low-stakes energy, the same "what if we just go check that thing out?" loop that made PEAK a surprise hit, Over the Hill channels all of it through an off-road lens.
It works, and it earns the comparison.
A World Worth Getting Distracted In
The demo drops you into Emerald Lake, a fictional Canadian area inspired by The Valhallas in British Columbia, and the first thing that hits you is just how good this looks.
The art style is stylized and clean rather than photorealistic, which makes it all the more impressive when the scenery stops you mid-drive.
Forested ridges, lakeside flats, waterfalls you can drive beside; the aesthetic has a genuine personality to it. I found myself pulling up the photo mode at least four times in the first twenty minutes.
The world design also delivers on one of gaming's great promises. You know the Skyrim bit: you see a mountain, and you can actually go to it? Over the Hill means it.
I spotted a distant ridge, pointed my wheels toward it, and the game didn't put an invisible wall in my way or funnel me down a preset trail.
I got there, and there was something worth finding when I did. That kind of faith in the world design is what carries the whole experience, and the demo earns it.
Rope Your Friends In First
I spent maybe five minutes in Over the Hill alone before I was already messaging my friends to download it. Once we were in together, the session went from pleasant to genuinely fun.
Driving in convoy, helping each other through trickier terrain, winching each other out of sticky situations, debating which navigable rock was least likely to end in someone drowning their engine; that's the experience the game is built around.
Don't walk in expecting MudRunner or SnowRunner depth. This is a much more accessible, breezy take on off-road traversal.
The vehicles are manageable and the terrain forgiving enough that you're rarely punished hard for just trying things. Some players will find that too light, but it matches the vibe the game is going for.
The charm of the whole thing is hard to overstate: Polaroid wildlife and off-roader photos, quiet mountain ambience, and of course a soundtrack that sounds exactly like it should.
Even when nothing dramatic was happening, I was happy just being in the space.
Where It Gets Complicated
I want to be fair, because a couple of things nagged at me during the demo.
Performance was inconsistent. My mid-range gaming laptop was working harder than I expected given the art style, and frame drops showed up in ways that didn't match what was actually on screen.
A game this visually restrained shouldn't stress mid-range hardware the way it did, and from what I've seen in the community, I'm not alone in this.
There's time to fix it before the full launch, and I hope they prioritize it. It did get better with updates, though,
The other issue is structural. Progression in the demo felt checklist-driven; find the crate, reach the scenic point, conquer the trail. Those objectives work well enough for nudging you toward exploration, and they're fine for an opening area.
The concern kicked in when I revisited a section with a friend who hadn't been there yet. They were having a great time discovering everything for the first time, but my half of the session was just...logistical.
Nothing new appeared for me, and the world didn't feel any different the second time around. Whether the full game introduces more organic reasons to revisit the same terrain is a real question that the demo couldn't answer.
The Fundamentals Are Good. Really Good.
What Over the Hill has going for it is a genuinely solid game underneath all of that. The driving feels right, the world is worth being in, and co-op makes a good thing better.
Funselektor has never shipped a bad game, and what I played during Next Fest suggests they're not about to start now.
The checklist concerns and the optimization rough edges are things that can be addressed; a world with this much personality is much harder to build from scratch.
There's a lot of 2026 still to go, and the full release will answer what the demo couldn't. I'm watching this one closely.
Stay tuned to racinggames.gg: The Best Website For Racing Games Coverage.