Jusant Gets Video Game Rock Climbing Right

Jusant is a video game about rock climbing released last week, developed by studio Don’t Nod of Life is Strange fame, among others. A host of people have recommended it to me, given my real-life love of climbing. I’ve been enjoying it a lot, even if it makes me wonder when–or if–there will ever be the climbing game of my dreams. 

Jusant looks a bit like Journey on the surface, with a voiceless protagonist navigating a mysterious, dun-colored world. But exploration is vertical here, rather than horizontal: you climb up through a civilization built into a rocky tower. Your character is attached to the cliff face by a rope, and you can attach additional rope points as you climb, meaning a fall costs you some upward progress instead of your character’s life. You have a little companion who can point the way and change the environment, helping you solve navigation puzzles as you explore the game’s abandoned city, reading diary entries to learn more about the place and the people who once lived there.

There’s a lot of care paid to the actual climbing, since that’s pretty much all you do. You use the left controller stick to reach for a hold, squeeze the right or left trigger to grab on with the corresponding hand, then switch between them to make your way along.  It’s physical without being clunky, and it requires just enough attention and strategy to be interesting without becoming tedious or overly challenging. Often, if I drifted too deeply into a mindless pattern of “left, right, left, right,” my carelessness would cause me to aim badly at a hold or forget to keep clutching the wall and drop. It keeps your focus on the act of climbing rather than what’s going on around you, but never so much so that you don’t get to admire the world you’re climbing through.   

You can also  jump and double jump to reach new handholds, which adds a nice sense of risk when your rope means you’re pretty safe. Jumps in real-life climbing are called “dynos” in the sport’s cringy parlance, and I think many games with climbing tend to overuse them–they’re big energy burns and so are usually done sparingly, though I might also be saying that because I’m terrible at them. (I also want to say you can’t double jump in real climbing, but a lot of speed climbers come pretty close.) A stamina meter keeps you from jumping too much, which you can refill in small bits while on the wall, and completely by standing on flat ground.

You’re also limited by the rope, which has to be attached to start climbing anything longer than a small ladder; this adds a comforting sense of safety and also lets you know you’re on the right path in your exploration. At the same time, you can only place three anchors to keep yourself from falling too far, and you’re also limited in how much rope you can unspool, cleverly indicated by your rope changing colors. In a few instances I found myself butting up against these systems; I’d get lost on a route and use up all my anchors, then hit the limits of my rope and be stuck, necessitating climbing back to remove my anchors (burning my fading stamina in the process) and starting a whole section again. Managing all this requires some thought and strategy, but it never feels like a rope management game. It evokes my real-life forays into lead climbing, where ropes and clips are part of the many things you’re thinking about without being your main focus. The rope can also be used to wall run or swing across space, another thing we don’t see in real-life climbing much, but which adds a welcome sense of momentum that reminds you that you’re playing an exploration game. 

Taken all together, these systems–alongside the occasional environmental puzzle whose solution is usually pretty clear–work together to create a game that feels just the right amount of chill while still requiring you to think about what you’re doing. The mystery of the game’s civilization and what happened to it quickly fell to the wayside for me, in favor of thinking about what I was making my character’s body do in space. Each climbing section has a wonderful sense of being a little journey in its own right, a feeling I love about climbing a long roped route. I’m especially fond of the little sigh your character sometimes makes, a noise I often make myself when I’m on a long upward journey in the climbing gym. 

I like Jusant a lot, and I especially like that climbing feels like its primary focus, but I wouldn’t call it a game about climbing. When I imagine what I think a “true” climbing game would be, I inevitably conjure up some kind of inelegant, QWOP-esque nightmare that would force you to navigate foot and hand placement, limb tension, stamina, pathfinding, and your own emotions in a way that couldn’t possibly be fun, much less technically possible. The best climbers make it all look simple–start at the bottom, end at the top–but there’s so much going on in your head and body when you climb that’s hard to translate into a game.

I get how that makes me sound like an annoying evangelist for the sport, or like some tech bro who invites you climbing so he can pitch you on his startup. I first got into climbing shortly after I got sober, following in the well-trod footsteps of other people who channel their panic about not being drunk after 5pm into sports. I was shocked to find that a sport that seemed like the adult version of playing after school as a kid was so physically and mentally demanding. I’ve had days at the climbing gym where getting one move further in a route was a major achievement; I’ve had seemingly insurmountable challenges be solved by moving my hand two inches to the left. I briefly learned to lead climb, which is sort of what your character does in Jusant–placing the rope as you go instead of using a rope already pinned to the top of a route–and learned a whole new repertoire of challenges and terrors: clipping the rope in backwards, letting the rope get behind my leg, catching a falling partner and getting yanked into the air in return. But none of these things are what climbing is essentially about, and all of them combined would make for a game even I don’t want to play. 

This isn’t to say a lot of games haven’t tried. Puzzle game Crux highlights the problem-solving aspects of climbing a boulder route, requiring you to move your character’s hands and feets in time-constrained sequence. In-development game Valley Peaks has a lovely sense of exploration and momentum, even if it has more dynos than I imagine any climber is able to perform for an extended period of time. A game like Insurmountable eschews the nitty-gritty of climbing to focus on the nitty-gritty of mountaineering. My colleague Mark Serrels, a better climber than I’ll ever be, has rigorously picked apart the climbing in Uncharted 4, and I’ve lost more hours than any human should climbing around in Zelda games. I’m sure there are a ton of climbing games I haven’t played (and which you should recommend to me in the comments, because I will play them) that choose one aspect of climbing to highlight or iterate on, but I don’t know if any one game will ever have it all.

But again, maybe they shouldn’t. Every good climbing game I’ve played mostly makes me want to leave my desk and go climbing, which is probably not the best goal for a video game. I’m excited to finish Jusant (a goal starting this website has kept me from), and then I’m excited to think about it at my local gym (a goal starting this website has also kept me from). Maybe that’s all I can ask from any game.