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dkirschner's Jusant (PC)

[July 26, 2024 09:42:39 AM]

This was neat. You basically climb a mountain, but it's like for real mountain climbing. You have to attach ropes and use LT and RT to grab holds with your left and right hands and stuff. I played the whole thing in one long sitting last night, and when I got done, realized by hands were cramped from pressing triggers for four hours. There are some other elements to the climbing mechanics related to the game's fantasy world, like various plants and creatures that help you climb. It's not hard, and I fell into a quiet rhythm.

A narrative guides you up the mountain, too. It's about climate change and environmentalism. In the past, there was rain and abundant water. But it seems like people used too much water / mismanaged their resources / polluted and the source from above dried up. Now, people live in a sun-baked wasteland. They go on expeditions into what was once a great ocean to try and find any water. One expedition went up instead to chase a tale of some creatures that brought water to the mountain. Your character is following in the footsteps of that expedition and actually (for some reason) has a baby one of those water creatures. What will you discover at the top?

Jusant is a very pretty game, colorful and with impressive scale. I never tired of looking out over the ocean basin or marveling at the vast interior hollows inside the mountain. The sound design complements this, and makes the adventure feel both peaceful and epic. The movement is fluid, and climbing feels good. I encountered some movement quirks, like that the character often won't jump forward, sometimes it can be tricky to get her to do some of the more fine maneuvering, and getting her to detach from a long rope swing doesn't always work how you think it will (she tends to hang on and not want to let go!). There are a lot of texts to find that provide context to the story. The "main" ones chronicling the mountain expedition I enjoyed, and there are more of those as you go higher. Lower on the mountain, there are a lot of collectibles that are just like mail that mountain residents pass to one another with them just chatting. I lost interest real fast in finding those ones.

Jusant was definitely something different. It's not a hard game; it's not even a particularly exciting game. It's rather calming and, like I said, sucked me into a rhythm. I was thinking about studies of flow among mountain climbers and it seems this can be reproduced with mountain climbing in a video game!