Cheese-Rolling is probably the most slapstick sport of all time so it comes as a bit of a surprise that nobody has made a game about it until now. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last hundred years or so, the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is an annual event that sees, frankly, insane competitors running—well, falling—down a steep Gloucestershire hill in pursuit of a round of Double Gloucester cheese. In an equally hilarious and horrifying way, it makes me proud to be British and I was all too giddy to try out a free multiplayer game from developer ‘The Interviewed’ based on the infamous sport.
As soon as I read about Cheese Rolling (thanks, PC Gamer), I downloaded it onto my Steam Deck. It didn’t take long as it’s only 500MB, which comes as no surprise given it emulates the blocky, low-poly art style of the original PlayStation era and has the limited draw distance to match. It looks terrible, which is perfect for the rustic and ridiculous nature of the original sport. The characters are all dressed in medieval garb and the start screen is accompanied by period-appropriate lute music, which lends to the theory that Cheese-Rolling is a tradition much older than its first recording in 1826.
I jumped into a lobby and a match began instantaneously as you can start a round of games with just two players instead of waiting for a full lobby of eight to fill, although the game seems densely populated at the moment. There’s also a solo mode for those averse to online multiplayer. Each round often takes less than ten seconds so I was soon dropped into a match and placed in a line with the other players at the top of a low-poly version of Cooper's Hill. A klaxon sounded and I saw that the cheese wheel was already on the move so I instinctively began to move my character with the left joystick. Just like the real race, I started off fleet-footed and hopeful, but then, after a few seconds, gravity humbly took over and my character’s legs crumpled underneath them. I was sent tumbling down the rest of the hill, amalgamating with a pile of flailing limbs at the bottom; my competitors and I forming a mass of human flesh not too dissimilar to Legion in the Castlevania games or The Huddle at the end of INSIDE.
The ragdoll physics that cause you to stumble, flip and careen down the hill are rib-tickling and match the absurd tone of the game and the sport itself. At first, I believed I was at the mercy of Cheese Rolling’s unpredictable physics-driven system but after a few rounds of hurtling to the bottom of the hill with no luck, I got used to the idiosyncratic physics and was able to anticipate the movement of my character and the cheese wheel. I learned when to use the A button to do a ‘jump’ and launch my character mid-roll; when to slow down, sometimes by pressing down on the joystick or by holding onto a fellow competitor to reduce my momentum; and when to make a desperate grasp for the wheel, or just wait until I could scoop it into my flailing arms after over-shooting its trajectory. After a few tries, I became much more adept at catching that slippery cheese wheel, sometimes in glorious fashion; pirouetting down the hill at full speed and catching it in mid-air. It became apparent there is actually some skill to Cheese Rolling, much like the real-life sport. I thought the winner was anyone who was lucky enough to reach the bottom of Cooper’s Hill without breaking a spine but that’s clearly not the case given how there have often been repeat winners, such as Christopher Anderson who has won the competition a record twenty-three times.
Cheese Rolling is a free game (you can buy an in-game knight in armour skin for £1.49 to support the devs) so is, as expected, pretty barebones beyond the experience of ragdolling down a hill in the pursuit of cheese. There are a couple of different settings, like a volcano level with lava either side of the hill that spews out any cheese or human that comes in contact with it, and a snowy level that has a frozen lake at the bottom that adds to the hilarity of multiple competitors slipping, sliding and colliding into one another in a desperate attempt to grab the cheese that has become a yellow hockey puck. There’s voice chat that can be muted (and your microphone is on by default so maybe check if you’re alright with that before jumping in!) but is mostly wholesome with people similarly desperately grunting and pissing themselves laughing at the absurdity of it all. I was in a lobby where two Japanese guys would purposefully grab my character at the start at the race in order to slow my descent and impede my progress and, honestly, I admired the shithousery, especially as they would laugh incessantly every time they did it. It added another wrinkle to gameplay to try and, at first, avoid their clutches, and then eventually play them at their own game and grab them back, resulting in a three-person brawl at the top of hill to the backdrop of Japanese guffaws, Takeshi’s Castle style.
It's such a simple yet joyous game and I’ve been playing Cheese Rolling for much longer than I anticipated (three hours now according to Steam). I would say it’s great as a second screen experience whilst chilling out on the sofa, but your laughs will surely drown out whatever’s on the TV.
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