![]() Just as a time investment, we’re talking about a couple of hours of careful navigation that’s easily nuked by a twist of fate on the final peak. These injuries seem random and can be ruinous: several times I’ve had an extra oxygen cost when moving, which is basically a death sentence. You tackle three peaks in succession, with permanent debuffing ‘scars’ carrying over between climbs. I’m less sold on the overall campaign structure. It’s a really effective bit of drama, and instils a juicy dose of fear for future runs. Even on a well prepared climb, with generous equipment drops and your desired perks, I’m always surprised how rough it gets up here - that it’s called the Death Zone should have been a clue. Now every nap or detour is sucking precious O2 from your tank and, unless you lucked into several spares lower down, it’s going to push you into riskier shortcuts and the misfortune only piles up from there. Hit the death zone, however, where the air thins, and the oxygen meter finally comes into play, and with it a complete shift in mentality. With the right perks - unlocked as you level up - and lucky equipment drops, it’s reasonably easy to find replenishing loops on this gentle ascent, freeing you to pillage every narrative tile, amassing thermoses (thermi?) and oxygen tanks for the harsh heights. Go on, make that sociopathic banker proud. These let you gamble time or stamina for a chance to discover an XP-rich story nugget or pry a thermos of coffee from the hands of the dead. On normal difficulty this is reasonably forgiving, relaxing even, as you soak in the ambient calm and make smooth progress between narrative event tiles. You also don’t want to be hitting caves during the day - you want to sleep away the nights, as everything drains faster and the mountain is visually obscured - or in friendlier weather, which should always be exploited for a few extra hours of unmolested hiking. ![]() At lower levels, the riskiest stat is stamina, as that requires sleep to replenish, and napping on the mountain turns you into a human popsicle if you don’t have a cave or a tent, which only has limited uses. From my runs it splits into a game of two halves. ![]() It's when one of these four meters hits zero that critical events start triggering with regularity, battering that all-important health bar. I’m always surprised how rough it gets up here - that it’s called the Death Zone should have been a clue. Well, as long as you don’t mind taking a longer route, which means more time in a place that is draining your heat, sanity and, at greater heights, oxygen. Then there’s also the issue of height difference, with a heavy stamina cost for scaling taller cliffs, enough to encourage you to clamber up more forgiving baby steps instead. Tiles are rock, snow or ice, which affects the stamina drain of crossing them, and have varying degrees of stability, which raises the odds of an accident occurring. It works by breaking the mountain into hexagonal tiles, which has a weird side effect of rendering each peak as a towering mound of Giants Causeway basalt or something out of the next Halo game. Just as a concept, I want to celebrate the cleverness of it all. This is not a polite hobby where you bank your progress for another day, and in this sense the do or die of a roguelike run feels more honest than the hilly simulations of Death Stranding or myriad VR climbing walls currently available. In this sense, Insurmountable’s decision to equate mountaineering with a survival roguelike is astute: one life, one run, all the while coping with the random luck or misfortune dealt by an unpredictable landscape. What stuck with me is how all or nothing a climb could be, something you commit to until you either get a killer anecdote or end as another speck of colourful polyester in Rainbow Valley. Hilariously, this was not the bleakest moment of the day (that was some nervous guy from IT bellowing “Show me the money!” to win book tokens or similar bullshit). As the then editor of a failing games magazine I couldn’t see any reading of the metaphor where I wasn’t the struggler and my website peers weren’t being told to leave me. You carry on going or expire on the spot. Apparently there comes an altitude where halting becomes so dangerous that it dooms any dawdlers. Mountain climbing as a roguelike: a surprisingly taut genre fit, occasionally let down by fiddly execution.Įverything I know about mountain climbing came from a corporate team-building day where management hired a banker who’d scaled Everest to tell us how he left most of his group to die in order to reach the summit.
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