There’s something acutely hilarious about a video my friend Tyler clipped when we played Peak for the first time. It’s him turning his camera to look for me, and in the distance you see me standing there looking up at the new, even more treacherous jungle terrain we have to scale. Over voice chat, I just go, “Oh no.” The phrase and flat affect escaping from my cherubic character’s mouth as my friend whip-pans his camera back to the terrain to reference what I’m looking at was completely improvised but seemed as taut as a scripted sequence in a movie. This is the most fun I’ve had in a game in a long time.
Peak alchemizes several trends in gaming from the past few years, taking bits of the structure from other popular streamer-friendly multiplayer games like Phasmophobia, Repo, and Lethal Company and mixing them with the cartoony designs and environmental polish of titles like Among Us and Fall Guys. Undergirding all of this is two teams’ (Landfall and Aggro Crab) talent with strong game writing, eye-popping art direction and clever mechanical choices, coming from scores of people who made both the goofy Totally Accurate simulator series as well as Going Under. Their combined forces have given players not just the ability to fail their way up (and very much down) a mountain, but also acts as a sandbox for their funniest impulses.
Peak does a lot of clever heavy lifting with physics and the camera to make everything from players to items to the environment operate with the kinetic silliness of a cartoon. This creates a space for players to really fuck around, usually punctuated by a swift emphasis on finding out, whether it’s slipping on jellyfish, falling into a poison puffball, or throwing an item to watch it roll downhill. Truly, the best way forward in the game is to fail spectacularly, and when fully embraced, Peak becomes America’s Funniest Home Videos-levels of pranks, pratfalls, sabotaging and hubris.
Part of the game’s popularity on social media and places like Twitch does seem to come from that cooperatively funny gameplay but also how legible it is to an audience. Camera movement is tied to head and eye adjustments in a naturalistic way, meaning you can see what another player is looking at in real time. Useful teamplay features like little hand widgets for pinging the terrain, using handgrabs and hoisting other players up aid collaboration in a concrete visual way. Proximity-based voice chat that indicates distance between team members but is also animated on character’s faces, with basic lip flaps moving in time with what anyone is saying or looking at. It feels less like a survival game at times and more like if Survivor was populated by vtubers. Streamers have been making quick work at capturing the hilarity in real time, but you can have fun playing it without it being “for content.”
Even just my friend and I playing alone elicited so many funny moments involving cussing coming out of tiny scout mouths or dying unceremoniously, punctuated by the easy bantering back and forth that comes naturally to us after playing games together for nearly 10 years. The game is so well-designed for this kind of Laurel and Hardy relationship, even if no one will ever see it. It made me drift away from some of the cynicism I have around games seeking to create performance from content creators, rather than generating that impulse organically. What ultimately changed my mind is that Peak’s mechanics inspire teamwork as much as pranking your friends. It reminded me that all adults love to play and goof off, especially in the era when the spaces and frameworks we have for those things (especially in gaming) have largely been boxed into creating value for platforms.
Games are not always supposed to be fun, but I admire that games like Peak are leaning into that idea. The fact that there’s another gaming space that has a potential for communal mirth only makes me happier post-COVID, and I’ve become increasingly reliant on those things to bridge the gap in my social schedule when my friends all live far away. Spending hours messing up and laughing feels like a cathartic release for the kind of perfectionism a lot of the other games that I normally play demand from me—or perhaps what I demand from myself. When we do finally reach the goal, it feels so much the better.
In the age of social media and digital video, any video game can have the potential to be funny even if unintentional, from streamers getting hit by a boulder during their first time in Dark Souls to random clips of people wiping out in Mario Kart. What Peak does is create a framework for the old Mel Brooks maxim about comedy and tragedy, except the open sewer is instead a big rock. A game getting one over on us turns the experience from one of isolated frustration to a human moment where we’re all in on the joke.
