I’ve done a lot of climbing in games, and while most of it is just holding the joystick towards the right direction I was surprisingly intrigued each time. Climbing not only works a gameplay point of view, but it also works from a narrative perspective as well. The mountain can symbolize the struggles of day to day life, or serve as a barrier between the protagonist and their goal. Each step up the mountain is a leap forward. Each descent or fall leads them further away from their goal. Each stop is a moment to let them think about their journey. How far they have come and how they shouldn’t give up just yet. The 2018 of God of War is a great example of this. They’re trying to spread Faye’s ashes atop the highest peak in the realm for it was her dying wish. However, the trip up the mountain is difficult and the Norse pantheon don’t want Kratos and Atreus to spread the ashes for secret reasons. Every roadblock feels like disappointment and frustration, but with the aid of new friends and journeying through the Nine Realms they obtain their goal. Spreading the ashes and also recollecting their personal growth. Celeste is another fantastic example in that this girl wants to climb the mountain to prove she can accomplish anything. She is loaded with anxiety, self doubt, misery, and so on. Overcoming the mountain allows her to get over her fears.
Climbing is interesting and the bodily coordination needed to navigate cliffs and many climbable surfaces alike requires years of training. It’s kind of like being Spider-Man. There’s a reason why your body has to be easily flexible, because if not expect your joints are gonna pop out. Climbing is cool, but I don’t think I ever played a video game that perfectly encapsulates climbing. I mean there have been games with realistic looking climbing. God of War as we mentioned earlier and its sequel. Uncharted, the recent Tomb Raider games, etc. These games use motion capture tech to capture the look and feel of climbing, but when you actually climb in those games you realize it’s just holding the joystick forward like I mentioned. Point vertically, then horizontally, maybe press a button to make a quick jump, and do that until you reach a ledge for which you can walk again. There hasn’t been a full on climbing game, but that wasn’t until recently. This year we’ve received innovative titles, mainly from the indie scene. Experimental ideas such as deciphering languages, entering worlds within worlds, and braving a nightmarish sea to fish for supplies. 2023 is a year full of innovation.
I present to you another game to enter the collection of innovative indies of 2023. Jusant, a short climbing game developed by Don’t Nod. They’re a French indie studio that was founded in 2008 and for more than a decade they have made a handful of games. One of which is Life Is Strange, it’s multiple sequels, and games that quite literally follow a similar formula. Personally I’m not a really big fan of those games, but Jusant gained my interest. This is the first game they’ve made in awhile that doesn’t follow the Life Is Strange formula. It focused on innovating on something that we see a lot of in games but never fully explored. It would be a small project developed on the side and maintain a short runtime. That is exactly what we got. A bite sized package which delivers a beautiful and breathtaking experience. Game Maker’s Toolkit has a series where every year he points out the most innovative game of the year. For 2023 it was Jusant and listening to the video I knew this would be a game I needed to check out. Bought the game during a sale and managed to beat it within the last two days. Jusant is great. It’s not one of my favorite games of 2023 and being a game with a niche gimmick it might be tricky to recommend.. However, I say it is better to recommend games that do something interesting rather than play it safe every single time. So today we’re gonna be talking about Jusant and why it deserves your attention.
Story
The ocean that once surrounded our great world has mysteriously dried up. Desert sands stretch for miles without end and it seems like human life has disintegrated with it. Well that’s what I’m going to assume seeing how they are absent this entire game. Boats which once sailed across the raging seas lie dead upon the sand. Unable to travel as there’s no longer a current to carry them. A child makes their way through the desert. Braving the heat until they come across a large stone pillar towering towards the sky. The child is equipped with climbing gear. A long string of rope, pitons, anchors, and much more. One of the pouches for which the child carries houses a creature and the creature is a mystery too. It seems to be some sort of whale baby as it makes the sound of one. However it’s body is gelatinous and has the touch of water. The water that once flowed and populated the earth’s surface. The child begins ascending up the stone spire. Uncovering the ruins of a society before. People who worked within this mountain and formed a community.
Said community disappeared alongside the water and the secrets of the spire remained unknown. You are here for those specific reasons. You will brave the spire and the many biomes it contains. The howling winds, beating heat, and atmosphere will do everything to work against you. It is man versus nature, and you dear child will deliver yourself and this soft creature to the top of the spire. Figure out what happened to the water of the earth. See what led to the eternal drought.
Gameplay
On the Steam store page, Jusant is listed as a puzzle platformer. On one hand I think it’s a great description for this game, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s doing the game enough justice. The way Jusant works is that you latch onto a climbable surface using both your hands. You can control your left hand and right hand, and alternating between the two you can move around. You hold down the triggers to grip onto something, and you let go to move your hands around. Before you climb you latch your rope onto a spot. While climbing you have three pitons available. By laying a piton down you create what is basically a makeshift checkpoint for yourself. If you fall you can pull yourself up to the last piton. You can also use an arrangement of pitons to create a hook for which you can swing on. You can also jump and double jump, but it’s not in the same way most platformers would do. To jump you must be pressed along a surface. Same goes with double jumping. Jumping consumes a bit of your stamina meter and if you miss the object you were trying to grab onto you better hope there’s something below to catch onto. Otherwise you're gonna fall and lose some progress.
Your stamina bar works in 2 different ways. The colored portion is your actual stamina. It’s used up whenever you climb or try to jump. Everytime you jump though, your maximum stamina will decrease. The bar fills up with white and you will have less stamina to work with. You can replenish stamina by resting, but maximum stamina otherwise the white part won’t recover. That’s why you must look out for spots that allow you to permanently rest and refill on pitons. Whether that be points in the walls or finding a ledge you can stand on. When you find a surface you can stand and walk around on you can detach and recollect your rope and pitons. While walking you may find structures, notes, and details about the world you are in. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention you have your little water whale companion. They can be used to point out where you should be going next and emit a huge echo. These echoes can be used to activate structures and plants while climbing. Oftentimes you will have to use him to create surfaces to climb onto and move forward. Besides that there’s really nothing much else to say about the game. It focuses mainly on one thing, but does that one thing really well. Hopefully you may ascend to the top of the spire, figure out the secrets that lie, and help your whale buddy achieve their purpose.
Thoughts
Jusant is a great game and there’s a lot to love about it. It has some flaws which we’ll address in a few, but just know I liked it and I thoroughly recommend it. Core gameplay loop is extremely well designed and despite doing the same thing over and over I never felt unengaged. Trying to figure out where to place my hands, how to climb efficiently, and get to where I needed to go. I will say that the game has no failsafes. You can’t walk off cliffs or ledges unless there’s a surface below you can climb along. The developers wanted to keep the adventure smooth paced and not let the player lose any of the progress they made. So they placed invisible walls along cliffs and made it so no matter how much max stamina they lost they have enough to keep climbing to their goal. That does mean Jusant isn’t a very punishing experience and at times the immersion takes a toll. However, Jusant still finds ways to challenge its player through how climbable surfaces are set up. Sometimes they throw in some unique mechanics you have to work around. They have these rocks creatures you can latch onto and they can carry you for a short period of time. They then tire out and you have to grab onto another rock creature to move further. Sometimes there is a set of rock creatures that move the opposite direction, but you need to quickly jump onto them and towards a surface or more rock creatures moving upward. There’s this one level where the sun is beaming down and the plants you activate to form grabbable surfaces will dry up. Another level has this wind that can either work for or against the player. Use to wind to either ascend or cross long distances, but you have to time it.
Good platformer design is when you combine mechanics to form complex challenges. Have the player alternate between everything they learned and make them feel awesome when perfectly navigating their surroundings. So I just kept on climbing and the reason why I kept climbing is because all I had to do was go up. There are a couple of times you have to wander around a flat surface, but in Jusant all you need to know is up is the way forward. This does make Jusant a strictly linear game, but the game still manages to surprise during the tightly set path. Whether that be the environments, scenes in the distance, or the spectacle of the journey. There’s this one moment later on where I was walking through a dark corridor. Only to emerge and find myself in a cavern full of glowing jellyfish. The cavern lit up crystal blue and the jellyfish contrasted with a neon orange. I navigated this cavern, what was left of the people before, and then I found myself along a windy cliff. The game is set primarily on the mountain, but the locales offer a ton of variation. Besides the gameplay loop of climbing more than eighty percent of the time, I think another aspect that will hook players in is the art direction. In some ways it kind of reminds me of the style Giant Squid Studio has with Abzu and The Pathless. These colorful games that lean a bit into realism, but have this cartoonish look. Like this even mixture between cell shading and what it would probably look like. I also really like the music and sound design for this game. It’s a very peaceful experience and the atmosphere is one that soaks in deeply. It also plays well into the cutscenes as they are beautifully animated. I'm surprised the devs of Life is Strange of all things could make a game look this good when in the past their games didn't really have the best animation. Especially robotic face movement.
The game takes three to four hours long to beat which is short for most people, but I said during my review of Cocoon it shouldn’t detract much from the overall experience. That means it has good pacing and knows when it should end. If the game kept going and going then more people probably would have gotten annoyed by it. The story takes a backseat for the most part, but it is a pretty good narrative and the ending is stunning. Just a good ending to a long adventure. I have a few complaints with the game. While the climbing system is great, the physics engine does not always work. In fact, the game occasionally bugs out and you can get caught in the environment. There are moments where you’ll be walking around and your character just gets stuck or caught in something. Part of the reason why I think this happens is because of the invisible walls so that you don’t walk off ledges. This creates collision issues where you have to fiddle the joystick and mash the jump button until you get out of the corner you got caught in. You can find a handful of notes and paintings to interact with if you check the right places. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a good reward for finding them. There seems to be a pattern when it comes to finding hidden stuff and not giving anything in return besides maybe a virtual trophy. Why not give the player a small stamina boost or easier handling with the jump maneuver? Yet again, this might trivialize a lot of the game so don’t take my full advice.
I praised the gameplay a lot and how innovative it is, but again I don’t think everyone will like Jusant. They may get bored of the gameplay and it will be too repetitive. That’s kind of why you need an open mindset when trying niche games. Finally, it seems like the camera jerks around whenever you climb or go up a flight of stairs. I thought there was something wrong with my controller, but it turned out to be the game. There does not seem to be an options to stop the camera automatically jerking and does get a bit annoying at times. I can understand why they did this though, because half the time you are looking up and you want to see what is above you. It didn't annoy me too much though and there's been games with worse cameras and settings. Jusant in my opinion is the first game to perfectly encapsulate climbing and that's why I recommend it. It’s engaging, not too long, and will surely put a smile on your face by the end. You owe it to yourself to play it and it would be nice to see Don’t Nod experiment more. Make more of these niece games and currently they are working on an action RPG filled with horror, magic, and more. It looks interesting and I’m excited to see where they take it. In the end I give Jusant an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
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