Bike games

Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a low poly third person camera downhill mountain biking game in the spirit of Ski Free where you progress and unlock stuff by improving on your past runs in specific ways. Great vibes and a lot of fun to come back to repeatedly. Really captures that "sketchy" feeling of descending on single track.

I have played it - and really enjoyed it so far. The open world has a good size and the races are fun. There's even an element of replayability to them that I enjoy a lot. I don't know if that has ever been done before, but one (optional) winning condition is to collect K-A-T letters (THPS-style) and win the race. It's a nice breath of fresh air that even doubles as a way for the player to learn shortcuts.

I've not yet raced any of the bosses, so can't say how much fun those are. But the game itself is a charming little Indy game that I enjoy a lot. Also worth mentioning: The soundtrack is amazing and there seems to be a fair bit of restraint in terms of collecting stuff in the open world. No scouring the world for 6247 hidden whatever's.

Concerning the cars: the ones that drive around are all pretty small and have a charming retro aesthetic - I don't mind them. Especially since the game makes it very clear that bikes are the cultural cornerstone of the world. There's also not that many of them - just enough to make weaving around them fun without being overbearing.

I was a big fan of Excitebike. I should see about getting a copy of that again.

Also Paperboy.

I don’t usually play sports games because i prefer to play actual sports but my buddy who rides enduro MTB with me loves Riders Republic. He plays it every time the weather isn’t conducive to riding.

Descenders is an extreme downhill trail bike game, it's tons of fun. The sequel is coming soon but first one is currently on sale for $6.25 and absolutely worth it.

Maybe not the vibe you're seeking exactly, but thought I'd add as a general recommendation

There's a genre of game where you are a rider on 2d bike and gravity pulls you to the bottom of the screen; you can rotate (or shift weight) and accelerate/brake, and you need to navigate the level of polygon colliders without letting anything but the wheels touch one. FOSS games in the 2D genre include X-Moto (source), a mature Elasto Mania-style game with precise physics and a large library of community levels; OpenElma, an incomplete open-source reimplementation of the Elasto Mania engine; ElmaJS, a JavaScript-based engine for viewing and simulating Elasto Mania levels and replays; FMX, a GPL-licensed revival of a classic freestyle motocross physics game; box2d-motorbike, a simple Box2D demo with basic motorbike physics; motorbike-game, a Python/Pygame physics bike prototype; and godot-trials, a Godot-based early-stage experiment in trials-style controls.