A quick sit down with developer Blackrock Studio’s stunt-centric ATV racing game Pure had us exclaiming out loud such sophisticated phrases as “Whoa!” and “Dang!” and we weren’t even playing the game. Before we got to see it, however, director Jason Avent wanted to explain what he was going for in Pure.

He describes an example of going snowboarding, where you come over the crest of a hill, and a huge vista opens up before you, forcing your jaw to drop while at the same time inducing a sense of vertigo and the height and distance of it all. Bringing that feeling to Pure is one of his main goals. All the while that he’s talking, we’re staring at the back of a rider on an ATV at the starting line, with some admittedly nice details in the environment - including individual rocks in the dirt and wildflowers growing alongside the road - but there’s no vista to speak of. With such a big introduction of a concept that frankly sounds difficult to pull off, we were a bit skeptical.

So he unpauses the game and tears off down the track. Everything looks like your typical dirt-racer (although certainly leagues prettier than MX vs ATV Untamed). Ten seconds in, he rounds a curve and roars up an incline. The road just cuts off at the lip of the ramp - we can’t see anything but blue sky beyond it. Then the ATV launches over the top, and holy crap, talk about delivering on a promise. A gigantic landscape heaves into view, complete with mountainous valleys, a distant lake, and snaking roads just begging to be explored. To ratchet up the sense of awe and vertigo, the game goes into slight slow-motion, the sound phases and shifts, and even the depth of field and depth perception stretch out. Then, of course, the rider performs some crazy tricks before plummeting back to Mother Earth.