An over the hill beginner guide is mostly about sequence, because the game deliberately does not race you. The official line is "this is a driving game, not a racing game", and the first area the developers describe, The Valley, is characterised as gentle slopes and rivers leading to a lake, explicitly framed as where you learn the driving basics. The correct opening move is therefore to stay in that easy terrain and learn the vehicle before you learn the map.
Everything below describes the June 2026 public demo, which closed on 30 June and is the only build the sources cover in detail. The full game is scheduled for 14 October 2026 at US$24.99, and no pre-order has been offered, so a demo-refresher is currently the most useful preparation available.
Start where the game expects you to start
The area descriptions read as a syllabus. The Valley is gentle slopes and rivers leading to a lake, which is where the official material says driving basics are learned. The Wetlands adds swamp, mud and rock-crawling terrain, and The Mountains is steep climbs and snowy high ground that tests the skills built earlier.
That ordering is worth taking literally on your first run. The cost of a mistake here is not a lap time, it is a winch recovery, so spending your first hour on slopes the starter car can actually climb saves far more time than driving straight at the hardest thing you can see. The demo's only playable content was Emerald Lake, the opening area of The Valhallas, so the early terrain is what you will be on regardless.
Bring a controller, not a steering wheel
Controllers are the recommended input, but the boundary is narrower than in most driving games. Steering wheels and force feedback are explicitly not supported at launch, with no future date confirmed. Keyboard and mouse are supported and are a first-class option rather than a fallback.
If your pad is not recognised, the official troubleshooting order is worth following in sequence rather than at random.
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Open the game's properties inside your Steam library |
| 2 | Toggle Steam Input — if it is on, turn it off, and if it is off, turn it on |
| 3 | Restart the game completely |
| 4 | Leave only the controller you are testing connected, and unplug other pads, wheels and sticks |
| 5 | In Steam settings, open controller settings, show advanced options, and enable the matching controller type |
The developers are explicit that no single configuration fixes every device, because different hardware exposes different input modes. One demo-specific quirk is worth knowing early: rebinding keys only registers if you navigate the Controls menu with a controller, so entering that screen another way shows the bindings locked.
Learn the winch before you need it
The winch is confirmed equipment on the vehicle rather than an unlock, so you can practise with it on the first run. Getting stuck is designed behaviour — flooding in a river, bogging in a peat swamp, sliding down a slick slope, beaching on rock and rolling over are all listed as ordinary outcomes — so the skill is diagnosing which recovery fits, not avoiding recovery entirely.
The rule that decides a winch attempt is geometry. Where a tree or suitable fixed point is close enough, the winch recovers you; where no anchor point is in range, no amount of line helps. Where the terrain offers nothing to attach to, portable winch anchors and a jack are equipped at the merchant, and if you cannot recover in place, the map offers a respawn to a cabin or the merchant. Whether a route's progress survives that respawn is not confirmed.
The three trail challenges are the unlock path
Completing trails is the mechanism the June announcement ties to unlocking the demo's three vehicles, and community reports put the demo at three trail challenges, two of which unlock vehicles beyond the starter. One report credits the Rocky Ascent route with unlocking the Burro, though that is a single community account and has not been reproduced.
The starter car is not the ceiling. A player in the community thread on the final trail reported completing the whole map in the starting vehicle after prioritising tires and a winch, and a later reply in the same thread suggested driving in manual first gear or low range, after which the original poster reported finishing. Treat that as a useful starting preference rather than a verified build guide — the full upgrade loadout, the line driven and the exact bindings were never recorded, and nothing in the material shows that unlocking another vehicle first is required.
Pebbles, the currency you can farm
Pebbles are the demo's unlock currency, and the developer answered a direct question about funding everything by confirming that a player can earn enough to fully upgrade all three demo vehicles. In the same answer the meteorites were described as infinite, which supports repeatable income inside the demo — though no spawn timer or earning rate has been published.
Meteorite extraction is the first place this guide can hand you exact steps. Park with clear space away from the rock, run the winch from the rear of the vehicle, attach the other end directly to the meteorite, then hold throttle and pull the winch while driving away. A correctly connected meteorite pulls free within a few seconds. In multiplayer every assisting vehicle must attach directly, because chaining them does not work; a larger cooperative rock may need more players, with no threshold published.
Camp tools, weather and the clock
Time and weather are systems rather than scenery, and both are managed from the merchant. The camp tool advances time and is equipped at the merchant, so the official guidance is to equip it before setting out and to use the tool when you want to skip ahead, rather than hunting for a sleep interaction at a cabin. Cancelling a camp early was confirmed as possible in an August reply.
Weather and tire condition both affect traction, which is why a slope can refuse to cooperate on one attempt and feel ordinary on the next. Vehicle damage reduces performance, and repair kits are limited, with buying a new upgrade explicitly not established as a substitute for repair. A day/night cycle runs alongside dynamic weather, so the same trail is a different problem at different hours.
Progress is personal, even in a convoy
Online co-op takes up to four players and there is no local split-screen, so every session is a remote one. Progress is recorded per player: each participant has to reach an objective checkpoint personally for it to count for them, so riding along in someone else's successful run does not advance your own objectives. Progress does transfer between single-player and multiplayer, so nothing is stranded by playing either way.
Saves, photos and the language you play in
In the June demo the save folder lives at Documents\My Games\over the hill on Windows, and in-game photos share that same root folder; a Steam Deck reaches it through a Proton prefix. Use the Documents path Windows actually reports rather than assuming a drive letter, since it can be redirected to another disk or a synced location, and back up the whole folder with the game closed.
What remains unknown before release
Several useful beginner details are still 待确认. The save file names, the photo subfolder, and whether Steam Cloud covers saves, photos or both are unpublished, and whether a demo save imports into the release build is 待确认 as well — which matters most for anyone planning to carry progress forward.
Two more gaps are worth flagging. No route-to-vehicle reward table has been published, so the community mapping of trail to unlock is inference rather than a confirmed list. And crossplay exists in the FAQ without platform pairing, so a group splitting across consoles should treat that detail as open. Whether route progress survives a map respawn is the last open item, and it decides whether a failed run costs minutes or an afternoon.