I love climbing things in games. But I don’t always love games that are firmly about climbing. Games that are firmly about climbing are often too technical for me – they tangle me up with ropes and pitons and tricky physics systems. Too many systems. Too many meters to manage. When climbing games are at their most arcadey – say something like Jusant, or Grow Home – I’m in, thoroughly in. But the best climbing I’ve ever had in a game was probably in Crackdown, and that’s an action game that just happens to let you stick to walls and ledges. The best climbing until now, anyway.
Peak is a climbing game. It’s firmly about climbing and it’s wonderful. And I’m happy to report it’s also got some of the best things to climb in all of games. It’s a game about climbing a mountain, alone or with three friends. I’ve been playing it solo, and I’m properly in love.
I gather Peak started life in a game jam. This makes total sense. It’s silly and knockabout, as a lot of game jam games can be. It feels like something of a lark. But also, underneath all that, it’s been pared back in a way that only a 48-hour deadline or something similar can allow for. There’s one meter for you to manage in Peak, and it’s audaciously, brilliantly simple. It’s your stamina meter. It goes down when you’re climbing, until there’s nothing left and you fall off the mountain. It builds up again when you’re resting or walking on flat surfaces, so you can have the juice to go climbing again.
So far, it’s the stamina meter from Zelda. And that’s great. But Peak’s particular stamina meter is a little bit better. You wear a backpack in Peak, with any items you’ve collected stowed in it. Cor, climbing in a backpack’s going to take it out of you, right? So a little part of your meter will be unavailable and marked with a backpack. That’s the stamina for climbing that you don’t have because you’re carrying things.
Beautiful! But Peak’s system is endlessly adaptable. The longer you play, the hungrier you get, so a little stomach section of the meter pops up and becomes unavailable for stamina services. You can make this section smaller by eating. But if you eat the wrong thing, a poison section pops up, and grows larger if you’re really seriously poisoned. This marks – you’ve got it – stamina for climbing that you don’t have because you’re currently poisoned. Ditto sleepiness. Ditto breaking a bone. All of this stuff is captured in one meter, and you understand it absolutely the first time you see it.
What this allows for is a game in which every other system gets out of the way and allows you to just climb. And yet you still climb in a world that thrums with the tensions created by those systems. Climbing is incredibly easy – you squeeze a trigger and push the stick and your hands steadily move you up the surface in front of you. But because it’s so simple you get to do cool things with it. You can use one stick to kind of fling yourself forward. You can use a button to jump between ledges. More than that, you learn to read the surface you’re climbing on, so you can anticipate when it flattens out enough for you to let go of the wall.
As for what you’re climbing, Peak crashes you in a desert island and then asks you to climb mountains made of four biomes, with rest-stops and a campfire separating each of them. The mountains are crafted from little curved lumps of rock, often with flattish tops, so you can work your way up as your stamina allows. You could almost say the entire thing is a series of discrete stamina puzzles.
And I say mountains plural, because every few hours, Peak swaps one out and swaps in a new one. I imagine they’re procedurally scrambled, but they all have a lovely sense of narrative to them. Not just the biomes, or the ways that you move from climbing trees to climbing rock. But the way that luggage from your plane is scattered around on them. Worth breaking off your ascent when you see a suitcase nearby? I have never been able to resist.
Suitcases give you items, some of which are useful – like flares and lanterns and pitons. Some give you food, which can allow you to regain your stamina meter. Sometimes the food does odd things. Energy drinks give me a separate super-energy meter, for example, but one that doesn’t last long. Meanwhile, a huge lollipop I found about an hour ago gave me a burst of psychedelic stamina that allowed me to climb for quite a while before it transitioned into a period of truly brutal sleepiness.
The mountain has other tricks. Sharp bushes and jellyfish? Turns out these things are bad and can hurt you. Apples and other fruit? These things are good! Mushrooms? Sometimes these things are good – stamina – but the other day I had a bunch in one go and was so swiftly filled with poison that I dropped dead. I think a lot of the fun of this game comes from understanding the systems, but also understanding the shifting risks that haunt these systems.
Peak is excellent climbing, then, and it’s also funny – it’s silly and platfallish, and I imagine this is only more true when you play with friends. It’s another of those hectic, seemingly simple four-player games enlivened by pals and proximity chat that there seem to be a lot of these days. REPO and Lethal Company and those sorts of things. Big Walk, which is a slightly more elegant and complex proposition, promises to contain a lot of this energy too, alongside some ingenious puzzles.
These games are surprise blockbusters that are hacked together out of bright ideas and they allow people to mess around with chums. They spread by word of mouth at school lunch breaks and the like. These games come and go, but I feel like they’re the custodians of quite a lot of gaming’s true vividness in these difficult times. Peak has been an enormous success over the last few days, and it’s impossible to play it and begrudge it any of that, I reckon. Great climbing, great fun, a very pure take on design. And maybe stay away from the mushrooms. Some of them, anyway.
Code for Peak was provided by the publisher.
