Beginner walkthrough · Endless sandboarder

Alto's Odyssey: one button, and a very long desert

A person on a sandboard travelling right, forever, across dunes at sunset. You have one button — the whole screen — and it does two things depending on how long you hold it. I have handed this to more nervous first-time players than anything else on this site, because it is almost impossible to feel bad at.

Type

Endless side-scrolling sandboarder

Session

One to six minutes per run

Controls

Tap to jump; hold to backflip; land facing down

Learning curve

Playable instantly, refined indefinitely

Played one-handed

Yes

Before you start

No setup and no tutorial beyond a line of text. You start moving the moment the run begins and you never stop moving until you fall. The screen is the button: a tap jumps, and holding through the jump makes you rotate.

The only failure is landing badly — head-first, or into a rock. There is no health, no enemies in the ordinary sense, and no timer.

The first run, beat by beat

Your first thirty seconds should be spent doing nothing but tapping to jump over gaps. Ignore the flips. The rhythm of the dunes — the way a downslope launches you further than a flat — is the thing worth learning first, and it is invisible if you are busy rotating.

Then try one backflip off a large dune. Hold the screen as you leave the ground and let go early enough to land flat. Landing mid-rotation is the single cause of almost every early crash, and the fix is always to let go sooner than feels right.

Grinds come next: passing over a rope or a rail automatically grinds if you land on it, and a grind that flows into a jump into a flip is where the game's whole appeal lives. Chaining those is the reason people keep playing, and none of it is required.

What to expect in your first hour

Runs of thirty seconds, then two minutes, then the occasional long one that turns into something quite peaceful. The environment changes as you travel — dunes to canyons to temples — and the weather shifts with it, which is largely cosmetic but does affect what you can see coming.

The game hands out small goals three at a time (do a certain number of flips, travel a distance) and they are the only structure. Chasing them is optional and mostly makes people play worse.

Five habits worth building early

• Let go of the flip early. Landing mid-rotation is the crash. Release sooner than instinct says.
• Jump on the downslope. The dune shape does most of the work; leaving from a descent carries far further than a flat launch.
• Ignore the goals at first. They pull you into risky tricks before you can land safely, which is backwards.
• Grinds are landings, not inputs. You do not press anything to grind — you just have to arrive on the rope.
• Play with sound on. The audio genuinely telegraphs the landing, and it is the closest thing to a warning the game gives you.

Is it for you?

Yes, more often than not. It is the least demanding game covered on this site and the best-looking by some distance, and it is unusual in being genuinely relaxing rather than merely easy.

It will not suit you if you want to be tested. There is no difficulty setting and no real ceiling; you simply travel further as you get better. If you want something with a board to think about, the Fishing walkthrough is at the other end of the shelf.

About this page. The Game Lantern is an informational site about mobile games. Alto's Odyssey is described here as free-to-play entertainment: it is played purely for fun, there is no financial element of any kind, nothing of monetary value can be paid in or taken out, and no prizes are involved. Any scores or counters mentioned exist only inside the game. We have no commercial or contractual relationship with any publisher or developer whose game is named on this page.