DIEATHLON is a biathlon that never lets you stop to shoot

You point yourself down a mountain and you do not stop. Cold winds push against you, monsters come out of the snow and give chase, and the only things between you and the bottom are a shotgun and your reflexes. You chart a course, blast through what is in the way, put down what is following you, and make the next decision before you have finished the last one.

The name is the design document. A biathlon is skiing and rifle shooting stapled together, and the reason it is a sport at all is that the two halves sabotage each other — skiing hard wrecks the steady hands that shooting needs, so the athlete keeps trading speed for accuracy at a standstill. DIEATHLON deletes the standstill. There is no range to arrive at, no moment where the descent pauses so the shooting can happen. Both are the same continuous act, and the trade is made at speed or not at all.

That changes what the shotgun is for. In most action games a gun is the thing that removes enemies. Here it is also the thing that clears your line: obstacles get blasted out of the way, which makes firing a piece of route maintenance as much as a piece of combat. Every shell is spent on one of two jobs, and choosing wrong is what the mountain is waiting for.

The routes are the other half. Hidden paths run deep into the rock, frozen water has leviathans under it, and some passages narrow down into swarms — each branch is its own set of hazards rather than a reskin of the last one. Firepower changes with the terrain too: a break-action shotgun for things that are close, a gatling gun for the frenzied masses, something heavier for the giants.

Downwell’s dual purpose design is the closest thing to a blueprint for this. The argument there is that nearly every part of Downwell holds down two or three jobs at once, and that the overlap is where its speed, its risk and its hard choices come from — one resource, several uses, no time to think. A shotgun that both kills the thing chasing you and opens the gap you are about to fall through is exactly that kind of overlap, and it is the part of DIEATHLON most worth getting right.

What Mirror’s Edge Catalyst should have learned from Burnout Paradise is the one to hold the multiple routes against. Burnout only turns a map into a game because its routes, its navigation and its mastery all run through the same system — you learn the city by taking bad lines and then better ones. Branching paths down a mountain earn nothing on their own. They pay when a player can tell, mid-run, that they picked the wrong one, and wants the other immediately.

Depth, mastery, and Vanquish covers the risk. Vanquish looks like a cover shooter and is actually a game about moving fast enough to make cover irrelevant, with an easy surface and a lot of expressive depth for anyone who pushes it. A descent with guns can land in the same place, or it can quietly become a shooter with a slope drawn behind it. What keeps it honest is whether the fast, aggressive line is also the strongest one.

DIEATHLON is made by Long Void Games and published by Loopr Partners. It is coming to Windows, currently listed for Q4 2026, filed under Action and Racing, single-player, with full controller support. The racing tag with no multiplayer next to it is telling — the thing you are racing is the mountain, and the leaderboard is however far down it you got.

It is worth saying what the store page does not promise. There is no date beyond the quarter it is aiming for, and nothing to play until it lands. What the page does give you is a clear picture of one loop — descend, shoot, branch, die — and a set of environments built to make each branch feel like a different mountain.

If the mountain is the part that appeals, Ski-E-O! is the other side of the same slope on this list. It hands you an actual mountain instead of a flat tycoon grid and asks you to carve the trails down it. One of these games is about drawing the line and the other is about surviving it.