When I pitched coverage on Cairn to the rest of the SmashPad staff, it was crickets.
I get it.
You have to be a special kind of sicko to look at footage of Cairn and decide it’s a game you’d love to play. To be honest, I saw the game a bunch of times at preview events and I never gave it a try because I already knew I’d be here talking about good it is.
The game is good. It’s getting people to Cairn that’s difficult.
An hour in — This was the moment I realized I was going to have a hard time playing this game.
Dad jokes from someone who isn’t a dad aside, Cairn is a rock climbing simulator with with its fair share of narrative and survival DNA. It’ll draw a lot of comparisons to Jusant, another indie climbing game with a rich narrative, except it’s both grim and exceedingly more difficult.
In the game, you play as Aava, a mountaineer who strives to become the first climber to conquer Mount Kami, a fictional mountain that obviously exudes an aura of danger. On this one-person expedition, you’ll come across other climbers, both dead and alive, and discover secrets and untold stories the mountain holds all while trying to stay alive in the hopes of reaching Kami’s summit.
Cairn is a slow burn. After all, you’re hiking and climbing the most treacherous mountain in the world, and nobody ever finished. As skilled as she is, Aava isn’t Lara Croft. She won’t be doing any fancy flips or shimmying up walls. It’s all about the climb and unlike other games with climbing in it, this isn’t a game where you simply hold up on the control stick or look for yellow guidelines to help you either.
I found some cheat sheet from some skeleton early on, and I still died climbing the “easy” routes.
Preparing for the climb is just as important as the act of climbing. It’s up to you to look at the rock faces and formations to decide the best way to scale Kami. Are there big enough cracks for your feet to fit into? Are there enough bumps on the rock to hold on to? Do you have enough chalk to grip smooth surfaces for a moment of more advanced maneuvers? Once you have an idea of how you want to tackle the rock, you start climbing and hope to everything mighty that you surface at some place to stand and walk like normal. All of this is easier said than done, whether or not you do well with the game’s tutorial.
As with most games, Cairn shows you how to play at the start. You’ll be in a building with a bunch of practice walls not unlike your local rock climbing gym (assuming you have one). Climbing is done by standing at a wall and pressing a button (square on PS5), and from there, you’ll be able to control Aava’s limbs one at a time to make the climb. As you place each limb with the square button, the game will decide whichever limb is the best to move next–and you can place any of those limbs anywhere within reach with the square button before moving other limbs. You can even put Aava’s arms and legs in really weird positions that the game somehow makes work, but again, she’s a good climber–but you do have to think about her comfort. You can also take a breath with the triangle button as you climb when you’re in a position that isn’t strenuous. It’ll be ideal for your stamina, which you can’t even see in the game. It’s all stuff you feel.
It takes a while to learn, and you’ll probably fall a lot; and even after you finish the practice walls at homebase, you’ll definitely struggle when it’s time to take on the real mountains.
There’ll be a lot of situations where you’ll be happy with your progress only to realize you didn’t do anything.
When I first started, I did okay with the first three practice walls, but when it came to the more advanced practice walls, I kept falling. All I did was fail. Even with that lack of success, I decided to move forward anyway, and that’s where I realized I was still in the tutorial. I’ll just spoil this much (and you’d already know this if you played the demo): you climb a small mountain in the tutorial before taking on Kami. This tutorial climb took me over an hour, and that hour only scratched the surface with what to expect later.
Other publications have called Cairn the Dark Souls of climbing games, and it makes sense. If you called Mount Kami and all its dangers bosses, you wouldn’t be wrong. If you’re not careful, you can slip and fall off a small ledge and die; it’s just like taking a smaller enemy lightly in a soulslike. Anything can kill you if you’re not being careful. If you kill a boss or big enemy in a souls game, you’ll be rewarded with loot. As you continue to climb Kami and find rest spots to put your tent up, not only will you uncover more of the narrative, but you’ll find food, water, and all kinds of sustenance to keep Aava going.
As you continue to progress up Mount Kami, you’ll learn that there’s more to Aava than being the very best climber that no one ever was. She’s actually a really off-putting person that’s abandoned a lot of people that care about her–all for the climb. All she really has is her gear and Climbot–the little robot that helps facilitate her climbs as well sort of acts as her only connection to the world away from the mountain, stressful civilization. Seeing this story unfold did a lot to take the me part out of it in ways that were entertaining, and considering Cairn is also a survival game, it was essential for me as the player to do whatever I could to keep her alive.
Luckily the heaviness of your bag doesn’t affect your climb. It’ll definitely suck if you’re out of food or water though.
As I mentioned, climbing in the game is harder than it looks. In the tutorial before I even got to the mountain part, I fell right as I reached the top, and every fall despite not dying felt like it hurt me. You can feel Aava’s frustration, and the reality is every time she messes up, it’s your fault. The narrative doesn’t break the fourth wall, but whenever Aava yelps out or shrieks whenever she slips, it’s hard to not think she’s taking out her frustration on you.
The reality is you’re not getting to the top of Mount Kami overnight. It’ll take some time and a lot of patience to see it through. Cairn can really pride itself in being the most realistic climbing simulator in the market because not only do you have to worry about actually climbing the mountain, you have to worry about actually surviving doing it, and I’m not talking about slipping and falling to death anymore. Climbing does a lot to your body, and if you’re going to survive, you’ll need to make sure Aava eats, drinks, rests, stays warm, and make sure her gear is good to go.
Eating, drinking, and sustenance is self-explanatory, but there’ll definitely be times where fatigue sets in. As Aava climbs, you’ll hear her struggles. Whether its heavy panting, moans of discomfort or pain, or the screen getting blurry, that all matters and it’ll be up to you to do whatever you can to alleviate that situation. That means keeping your bag well stocked with combinations of different consumables, supplements, and tools like pitons and chalk to keep her head in the game. There will be times where you’ll come across no visible handholds and have to power your way through a climb, and there will be times were cold weather and rain will make things difficult. Again, you can power through that with the help of chalk or consumables, or go back down to get some more rest and wait bad weather out. Oh, and let’s not forget that bats, birds, and bears can also make survival even harder.
Of course we found somebody who looks like Link in a climbing game.
When you decide to rest and start up camp, it’ll save the game, and you’ll also have the ability to cook, eat, heal and bandage up your climbing wounds with climbing tape, and rest. Cooking is essential because heated food is going to be the only thing that’ll keep her warm. When choosing to rest, you’ll be able to take as much time as you need, and you’ll even be able to wait out bad weather. Of course, the longer you stay in your tent, the more consumables you’ll end up using because waiting around makes you both hungry and sleepy, so you’ll have to get on with the climb eventually.
Suffer and plan enough and you’ll eventually reach the top. It took me around 10 hours to reach the summit of Mount Kami, and it simply felt amazing. Part of why it felt that way was because I remember what it took to get up there. Never mind the plot details (because a bunch of different things happen toward the end that’ll affect the ending); Cairn does a good job making sure you know about both your journey and the struggle. Every time you die, you’ll be able to see your route from the beginning of the climb. Every time you load the game, you’ll be able to see how much closer or further you are from the summit. Not only that, but you’ll be able to see your exact route up the mountain, how much you walked, where you fell, where you died–all of it. It all just makes you think, “Dang, I did all that.”
You’re probably at this point of the review thinking the game might be too hard for you. There’s no harm in thinking that. Even if you turn some of the accessibility options on, it could still be difficult. I’m an able-bodied person so I’m not going to be able to tell you how useful some of the options are like my fellow editor Filippo would, but I’ll say they do make the game considerably easier.
I don’t think Nathan Drake, Altair, or Lara Croft would survive in this situation.
One thing you can do to make the game more approachable is turn off auto-limb control, which gives you full agency of which limbs to move by tapping on the right shoulder button and hitting the button corresponding to which limb to move. Another thing you can do is have those limbs be highlighted during the climb, and if you absolutely need to, you can turn on a rewind function. This pretty much gives you a fail safe as you climb, obviously giving you the ability to rewind every fall, but I will say it’s not foolproof. If you chose a rough route not equal to your level of skill at the climb, no amount of rewinding will save you, and it’s also really easy to do that. All that said, I wouldn’t classify any of these accessibility options as cheating. Do what you have to.
One thing I think sort of quantifies cheating is the fact that you can turn off survival mode. With this function, Aava can’t get hungry, thirsty, or cold. Thinking about her sustenance and her comfort is a big part of what I think makes the game both realistic and enjoyable, so if you really hate survival aspects in video games and really want to get to the top that bad, that’s an option.
Now that you’re here, do you think Cairn is a game you might want to play? It might not be, and I wouldn’t blame you. Again, any would be hard pressed to find somebody who’ll watch this game in action and have the sudden urge to spend what can be frustrating hours playing it.
Getting to the top the first time can take anywhere between 10-15 hours, and it’s always cool seeing this when you boot up the game for the first time during the day.
A lot of us know a rock climber, a runner, or someone who hikes. You, yourself, might even be one, two, or all three of those things. Let’s bring this real life situation closer to what Cairn is. I personally enjoy hiking, but I’ve only really done four hikes in my life. A few years ago, I hiked Half Dome (a 17-mile round trip trek) in Yosemite… the day after hiking Sentinel Dome (2 miles), also in Yosemite. Yep, two of the four or so hikes I did were done in the same week. We started hiking Half Dome at 3AM, and we got back to our cabin at 8PM. It was long, hard, and treacherous, so best believe I took all the selfies I could when I got to the top. But you know what sucked after that? Going back down and hiking back to the car. That was arguably worse than getting up there.
This is why finishing Cairn felt awesome. I’m not a rock climber, but I know what it takes to make it up that mountain. I remember being close to the top of Half Dome, looking back, seeing no signal on my cell phone and realizing I really could die there. I felt the same whenever I completed a section of Mount Kami as Aava. Every time I got to a base on the mountain where I could walk a little and set up camp, I’d take a look back at the distance and remember what it took to get up there. The fact that a video game can make me think all that really makes it special.
Not everyone is going to feel this way though. I definitely do see a scenario where people pick this up, and abandon it out of a combination of frustration and being to proud to turn some accessibility options on. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed Cairn so much, I’ve started a permadeath run and am really surprised with how far I’ve gotten to this point. I’m sure I won’t actually finish and other games will force me to move on, but I already know that whenever I come across a discussion about this game in person, I’ll be singing its praises.
Every time I got to a base on the mountain where I could walk a little and set up camp, I’d take a look back at the distance and remember what it took to get up there. The fact that a video game can make me think all that really makes it special.
When I pitched coverage on Cairn to the rest of the SmashPad staff, it was crickets.
I get it.
You have to be a special kind of sicko to look at footage of Cairn and decide it’s a game you’d love to play. To be honest, I saw the game a bunch of times at preview events and I never gave it a try because I already knew I’d be here talking about good it is.
The game is good. It’s getting people to Cairn that’s difficult.
An hour in — This was the moment I realized I was going to have a hard time playing this game.
Dad jokes from someone who isn’t a dad aside, Cairn is a rock climbing simulator with with its fair share of narrative and survival DNA. It’ll draw a lot of comparisons to Jusant, another indie climbing game with a rich narrative, except it’s both grim and exceedingly more difficult.
In the game, you play as Aava, a mountaineer who strives to become the first climber to conquer Mount Kami, a fictional mountain that obviously exudes an aura of danger. On this one-person expedition, you’ll come across other climbers, both dead and alive, and discover secrets and untold stories the mountain holds all while trying to stay alive in the hopes of reaching Kami’s summit.
Cairn is a slow burn. After all, you’re hiking and climbing the most treacherous mountain in the world, and nobody ever finished. As skilled as she is, Aava isn’t Lara Croft. She won’t be doing any fancy flips or shimmying up walls. It’s all about the climb and unlike other games with climbing in it, this isn’t a game where you simply hold up on the control stick or look for yellow guidelines to help you either.
I found some cheat sheet from some skeleton early on, and I still died climbing the “easy” routes.
Preparing for the climb is just as important as the act of climbing. It’s up to you to look at the rock faces and formations to decide the best way to scale Kami. Are there big enough cracks for your feet to fit into? Are there enough bumps on the rock to hold on to? Do you have enough chalk to grip smooth surfaces for a moment of more advanced maneuvers? Once you have an idea of how you want to tackle the rock, you start climbing and hope to everything mighty that you surface at some place to stand and walk like normal. All of this is easier said than done, whether or not you do well with the game’s tutorial.
As with most games, Cairn shows you how to play at the start. You’ll be in a building with a bunch of practice walls not unlike your local rock climbing gym (assuming you have one). Climbing is done by standing at a wall and pressing a button (square on PS5), and from there, you’ll be able to control Aava’s limbs one at a time to make the climb. As you place each limb with the square button, the game will decide whichever limb is the best to move next–and you can place any of those limbs anywhere within reach with the square button before moving other limbs. You can even put Aava’s arms and legs in really weird positions that the game somehow makes work, but again, she’s a good climber–but you do have to think about her comfort. You can also take a breath with the triangle button as you climb when you’re in a position that isn’t strenuous. It’ll be ideal for your stamina, which you can’t even see in the game. It’s all stuff you feel.
It takes a while to learn, and you’ll probably fall a lot; and even after you finish the practice walls at homebase, you’ll definitely struggle when it’s time to take on the real mountains.
There’ll be a lot of situations where you’ll be happy with your progress only to realize you didn’t do anything.
When I first started, I did okay with the first three practice walls, but when it came to the more advanced practice walls, I kept falling. All I did was fail. Even with that lack of success, I decided to move forward anyway, and that’s where I realized I was still in the tutorial. I’ll just spoil this much (and you’d already know this if you played the demo): you climb a small mountain in the tutorial before taking on Kami. This tutorial climb took me over an hour, and that hour only scratched the surface with what to expect later.
Other publications have called Cairn the Dark Souls of climbing games, and it makes sense. If you called Mount Kami and all its dangers bosses, you wouldn’t be wrong. If you’re not careful, you can slip and fall off a small ledge and die; it’s just like taking a smaller enemy lightly in a soulslike. Anything can kill you if you’re not being careful. If you kill a boss or big enemy in a souls game, you’ll be rewarded with loot. As you continue to climb Kami and find rest spots to put your tent up, not only will you uncover more of the narrative, but you’ll find food, water, and all kinds of sustenance to keep Aava going.
As you continue to progress up Mount Kami, you’ll learn that there’s more to Aava than being the very best climber that no one ever was. She’s actually a really off-putting person that’s abandoned a lot of people that care about her–all for the climb. All she really has is her gear and Climbot–the little robot that helps facilitate her climbs as well sort of acts as her only connection to the world away from the mountain, stressful civilization. Seeing this story unfold did a lot to take the me part out of it in ways that were entertaining, and considering Cairn is also a survival game, it was essential for me as the player to do whatever I could to keep her alive.
Luckily the heaviness of your bag doesn’t affect your climb. It’ll definitely suck if you’re out of food or water though.
As I mentioned, climbing in the game is harder than it looks. In the tutorial before I even got to the mountain part, I fell right as I reached the top, and every fall despite not dying felt like it hurt me. You can feel Aava’s frustration, and the reality is every time she messes up, it’s your fault. The narrative doesn’t break the fourth wall, but whenever Aava yelps out or shrieks whenever she slips, it’s hard to not think she’s taking out her frustration on you.
The reality is you’re not getting to the top of Mount Kami overnight. It’ll take some time and a lot of patience to see it through. Cairn can really pride itself in being the most realistic climbing simulator in the market because not only do you have to worry about actually climbing the mountain, you have to worry about actually surviving doing it, and I’m not talking about slipping and falling to death anymore. Climbing does a lot to your body, and if you’re going to survive, you’ll need to make sure Aava eats, drinks, rests, stays warm, and make sure her gear is good to go.
Eating, drinking, and sustenance is self-explanatory, but there’ll definitely be times where fatigue sets in. As Aava climbs, you’ll hear her struggles. Whether its heavy panting, moans of discomfort or pain, or the screen getting blurry, that all matters and it’ll be up to you to do whatever you can to alleviate that situation. That means keeping your bag well stocked with combinations of different consumables, supplements, and tools like pitons and chalk to keep her head in the game. There will be times where you’ll come across no visible handholds and have to power your way through a climb, and there will be times were cold weather and rain will make things difficult. Again, you can power through that with the help of chalk or consumables, or go back down to get some more rest and wait bad weather out. Oh, and let’s not forget that bats, birds, and bears can also make survival even harder.
Of course we found somebody who looks like Link in a climbing game.
When you decide to rest and start up camp, it’ll save the game, and you’ll also have the ability to cook, eat, heal and bandage up your climbing wounds with climbing tape, and rest. Cooking is essential because heated food is going to be the only thing that’ll keep her warm. When choosing to rest, you’ll be able to take as much time as you need, and you’ll even be able to wait out bad weather. Of course, the longer you stay in your tent, the more consumables you’ll end up using because waiting around makes you both hungry and sleepy, so you’ll have to get on with the climb eventually.
Suffer and plan enough and you’ll eventually reach the top. It took me around 10 hours to reach the summit of Mount Kami, and it simply felt amazing. Part of why it felt that way was because I remember what it took to get up there. Never mind the plot details (because a bunch of different things happen toward the end that’ll affect the ending); Cairn does a good job making sure you know about both your journey and the struggle. Every time you die, you’ll be able to see your route from the beginning of the climb. Every time you load the game, you’ll be able to see how much closer or further you are from the summit. Not only that, but you’ll be able to see your exact route up the mountain, how much you walked, where you fell, where you died–all of it. It all just makes you think, “Dang, I did all that.”
You’re probably at this point of the review thinking the game might be too hard for you. There’s no harm in thinking that. Even if you turn some of the accessibility options on, it could still be difficult. I’m an able-bodied person so I’m not going to be able to tell you how useful some of the options are like my fellow editor Filippo would, but I’ll say they do make the game considerably easier.
I don’t think Nathan Drake, Altair, or Lara Croft would survive in this situation.
One thing you can do to make the game more approachable is turn off auto-limb control, which gives you full agency of which limbs to move by tapping on the right shoulder button and hitting the button corresponding to which limb to move. Another thing you can do is have those limbs be highlighted during the climb, and if you absolutely need to, you can turn on a rewind function. This pretty much gives you a fail safe as you climb, obviously giving you the ability to rewind every fall, but I will say it’s not foolproof. If you chose a rough route not equal to your level of skill at the climb, no amount of rewinding will save you, and it’s also really easy to do that. All that said, I wouldn’t classify any of these accessibility options as cheating. Do what you have to.
One thing I think sort of quantifies cheating is the fact that you can turn off survival mode. With this function, Aava can’t get hungry, thirsty, or cold. Thinking about her sustenance and her comfort is a big part of what I think makes the game both realistic and enjoyable, so if you really hate survival aspects in video games and really want to get to the top that bad, that’s an option.
Now that you’re here, do you think Cairn is a game you might want to play? It might not be, and I wouldn’t blame you. Again, any would be hard pressed to find somebody who’ll watch this game in action and have the sudden urge to spend what can be frustrating hours playing it.
Getting to the top the first time can take anywhere between 10-15 hours, and it’s always cool seeing this when you boot up the game for the first time during the day.
A lot of us know a rock climber, a runner, or someone who hikes. You, yourself, might even be one, two, or all three of those things. Let’s bring this real life situation closer to what Cairn is. I personally enjoy hiking, but I’ve only really done four hikes in my life. A few years ago, I hiked Half Dome (a 17-mile round trip trek) in Yosemite… the day after hiking Sentinel Dome (2 miles), also in Yosemite. Yep, two of the four or so hikes I did were done in the same week. We started hiking Half Dome at 3AM, and we got back to our cabin at 8PM. It was long, hard, and treacherous, so best believe I took all the selfies I could when I got to the top. But you know what sucked after that? Going back down and hiking back to the car. That was arguably worse than getting up there.
This is why finishing Cairn felt awesome. I’m not a rock climber, but I know what it takes to make it up that mountain. I remember being close to the top of Half Dome, looking back, seeing no signal on my cell phone and realizing I really could die there. I felt the same whenever I completed a section of Mount Kami as Aava. Every time I got to a base on the mountain where I could walk a little and set up camp, I’d take a look back at the distance and remember what it took to get up there. The fact that a video game can make me think all that really makes it special.
Not everyone is going to feel this way though. I definitely do see a scenario where people pick this up, and abandon it out of a combination of frustration and being to proud to turn some accessibility options on. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed Cairn so much, I’ve started a permadeath run and am really surprised with how far I’ve gotten to this point. I’m sure I won’t actually finish and other games will force me to move on, but I already know that whenever I come across a discussion about this game in person, I’ll be singing its praises.
by Danreb Victorio
