Cairn

Mountain climbing can be pretty fun.

I played this on my PS5.

Cairn is a game about, well, climbing a mountain. There's more to it than that, but it is fundamentally a game where you deal with the nitty-gritty details that come with scaling a large rock. There are multiple stats to keep track of and resources to manage, but the core of this game is that it puts you in the shoes of someone as she climbs a mountain. You have free control of each of her limbs and, using this, can plant each limb anywhere on the rock face (within reach).

When I describe the premise of this game to people, the first thing that pretty much everyone says is, "oh, so it's like QWOP for mountain-climbing". And to that I say, "uh, that already exists." Bennett Foddy also made a game called GIRP that is, quite literally, his take on mountain climbing. Pedantics aside, however, this game is in fact very reminiscent of GIRP (and, in a way, QWOP) because this is a heavily physics-driven game where your character's movements are, to an almost frustrating extent, up to you.

There are a number of accessibility options and difficulty tweaks you can enable to make things somewhat easier, but the game will still require you to play intelligently even with everything turned on. Personally, I recommend enabling "Holds Feedback" (which provides visual feedback when you have a limb planted firmly), making sure "Manual Limb Selection" is checked, and setting "Manual Selection Mode" to "Dial" (which makes selecting a specific limb far more consistent). Additionally, don't be afraid to use the "Assist Mode" options! There's no shame in tweaking the difficulty to make the game more fun for you. I played with "Fall-Rewind" on mostly just to save myself a bit of time on climbing back up stuff (and because I got screwed by Physics™ a handful of times).

The game also, to my surprise, has a fairly compelling story. It's not the most elaborate or surprising, but it is effective at doing what it sets out to do. I won't go into the specifics, partially because there really isn't a whole lot for me to even talk about, but I enjoyed watching this character justify her actions as she made her way up this arduous climb.

Now, I feel like I need to talk about the ending, so quit reading if you want to remain unspoiled on that. I really enjoyed my time with this and if any of what I've described until now interested you, there's a chance you might enjoy it too. With that out of the way, I'll continue.

I actually beat this game a few days ago but I've held off on writing this because, well, I technically haven't finished it. Well, that's not entirely true. I played the game up to the point where I hit credits, and I got a completion screen (which you can see below), but there's still more to this game I haven't yet played.

I had fall-rewind on at the end, for reasons I've already mentioned.

You see, about 80-90% of the way up the mountain, there's a story sequence that lays out that every climber who's come before you has died on the way up the final stretch. You're then offered a choice: continue the climb to the summit, or go back down with the other hiker you met on your journey. I struggled with this choice for some time, as I wasn't sure which Aava (the protagonist) would choose, but I ultimately opted to go down and end my climb there. The game then cuts to credits with a montage showing the two descending the mountain, and the game ends.

Now, the game saves you the trouble of needing to replay the entire game to see the other ending because it lets you revert to your last save (prior to that decision), but I'm not sure I should see the rest of this game. I chose to stop my journey when I was almost there, but I feel like reverting my save and seeing how the story could have gone feels almost antithetical to what the game is trying to say. I made my choice and I should be forced to live with it, just as Aava does, and I'll need to sit with that lack of satisfaction whenever I reflect on this game. 

Video games, and a lot of stories I come across if I'm being honest, feel afraid of an anticlimax. I have seen so many movies and narratives that come close to ending things calmly before pulling the rug out from under you and having some big dramatic showdown or confrontation. So often, they want to gesture at something profoundly interesting before having their cake and eating it too by going with something predictable. Real life doesn't always give you that satisfaction, so a story that reflects that feels far more interesting (and in line with what I think the game wants to say) than simply having a few more sequences for me to climb and, I'm sure, a compelling conclusion at the summit.

I was so close.

I really dug this game. The movement is tactile and satisfying in a way I didn't quite anticipate, and it had a narrative that was compelling enough to make me care about its characters. I couldn't really ask for more.