I love a rock climbing game, despite the fact that I have hardly climbed at all since moving back to New York. Every climbing game seems to have its own unique take on the sport, from hyper-realistic to fantastical, from enjoying the view to focusing on what’s under your hands and feet. The take of recent indie game Peak leans toward both fantasy and simplicity, doing away with the affectations of other climbing games to make things both easier and more difficult.
It’s pretty clear to me that Peak wants to be played co-op, and honestly I might have given up on my solo session if Eurogamer hadn't praised playing it alone. The game opens with your plane crashing on a mysterious island, where you have to climb from a beach to a plume of smoke at the top of a mountain. With friends, I could see this being a hilarious or back-stabbing adventure; alone, I at first found it a bit challenging to make progress while managing my character’s weight and stamina. Without a friend to boost or pull me up a lengthy rock face, or companions to spread the weight of gear around with, I had to spend a lot of time circling the mountain looking for short climbs. But eventually I got the hang of it, making it to the top of the mountain and opening up new, more challenging areas to scale.
Peak has its own approach to climbing mechanics. Instead of looking for handholds or routes, you can basically climb anything simply by pressing a button to attach to it. This relative ease is made complicated by your stamina bar, which, unlike other climbing games that use stamina as one of several meters, is the entire deciding factor in how far you can climb. You have just the one bar, and then things take chunks out of it: how much stuff is in your backpack, being hungry, getting injured. Each of these is represented by its own color and symbol, making it easy to understand why your whole stamina bar isn’t available.

Less easy is what you’re supposed to do about it, which is where a lot of the fun of Peak comes in. Dealing with hunger is particularly complex; in addition to packaged food you can find in suitcases scattered around the world, there’s also edible plants and fruits. They’ll all address your hunger, but they have hidden effects too. In my time with the game, desperate for food so I could regain stamina and make progress, I made my situation worse by carrying heavy coconut halves, or poisoned myself with mysterious berries. Other foods have positive effects; if you’re encountering something for the first time, there’s no way to know what it will do except try it out.
There’s also plenty of environmental hazards: In the first level, I regularly slipped on jellyfish if I wasn’t careful to scoot around them. In the second mountain, a jungle slope replete with rain and thorny vines, I wandered into…something: my screen went purple and my poison meter shot up, and of course I tumbled to my death. The mountains change on regular intervals, so while enough play will probably undo the mystery of these hazards, there’s still new things to discover and overcome.
All of this means that, alone, I frequently felt like I couldn’t make any progress when situations had taken too much out of my stamina and there was no one to help me address it. On the standard difficulty there’s also a time limit, enforced by rising fog, though you can lower the difficulty to turn it off. But once I accepted that I couldn’t make the long climbs of other games and had to get a bit more creative, Peak’s solo gameplay opened up to me. It became less about brute forcing my way up as quickly as possible and more about exploring and learning the land, strategically choosing my path to make little pieces of progress. And, the higher I got, the more tense things got: the riskier climbs and jumps felt, the more stressful deciding whether to eat a new food became. Every pathway and item required a careful balancing of risk versus reward, while the game’s straightforward mechanic and bright colors kept things feeling more goofy than grim.
I’m enjoying Peak on my own, though I’d love to try it out with friends. Peak started life as a game jam game between developers Aggro Crab and Landfall, and has gone on to sell one million copies in its first week, which means probably someone I know owns it and can be convinced to listen to me wax poetic about climbing while we fling and drop each other to our dooms.