As soon as I rolled the credits on Cairn, I immediately started a new playthrough and began anew. That’s when I realised the thing I had just experienced was special.
To put it simply, I don’t just think Cairn will be one of the best games of the year, I think it might be one of the best video games I’ve ever played.
In Cairn, you play as Aava, a professional climber and mountaineer who aspires to be the first person to reach the summit of Mount Kami, discovering the mountain’s secrets along the way.
I’m not a professional climber, but it’s easy to see how well The Game Bakers has effortlessly translated the core challenges of rockclimbing into a playable video game format. In order to scale Kami’s sheer verticality, you control each of Aava’s limbs with an innovative control system as she navigates various handholds and footholds that will allow her to climb.
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What Death Stranding did for walking, Cairn does for climbing. The game automatically selects which limb to use based on her posture and weight distribution, however an optional manual limb selection mode also serves as a way to gain control over how you move Aava across each vertical surface.
Overexerting yourself can result in Aava losing her balance and falling, potentially undoing loads of progress. While there is an in-game HUD which pops in and out when needed, many things like Aava’s posture and stamina are not communicated through this, and instead rely on your observational skills to judge how she’s doing. Her limbs may start trembling, her breaths getting heavier, and it may become trickier to move into a more comfortable position.
Further complications include Aava damaging her fingers, requiring the use of bandages to fix them up and improve her grip, and her pitons breaking due to overuse, which can be problematic if you rely too heavily on them. Kami can be fully scaled without using pitons, but your ascent will be much more difficult without them. And so, it becomes a case of managing your resources wisely, keeping your equipment in tip-top shape while also ensuring Aava is happily fed for her entire time on the mountain.
A Difficult Game, But Not Unfairly So
As Aava edges closer to the top, further complications turns Cairn from a peaceful climbing game into a brutal battle against many different threats. Surfaces become harder to scale, the weather gets harsher, and supplies will start to dwindle, which make it harder to recover her hunger, thirst, and temperature thresholds from depleting. It’s such a dramatic change that the second half of the game feels like a huge departure from the earlier sequences, but Cairn manages that shift in a way that feels tangible and rewarding.
The higher I climbed, the more I became invested in Aava’s journey to reach the top. She has her own reasons for doing what she does, and I found the character’s motivations interesting to engage with. She’s stubborn, distant, and has many frustrations of her own, but these aren’t presented in a way that makes the character insufferable. Instead, she feels like a real human. To add the cherry on top, the voice performance by Sophia Eleni brings Aava to life, delivering a performance that finds the perfect fine line between sensitivity and determination.
It's Not The Mountain We Conquer, But Ourselves
Joining her at various points during the climb is Marco, who is basically Aava’s complete opposite. He’s young and inexperienced, but also eager to learn more from his fellow climber. Voice actor Hyoie O’Grady portrays Marco, and both performances allow these two polar opposites to thrive against each other.
It’s this aspect of the game that I think Cairn’s greatest strengths lie. Without Aava’s story bringing a more personal flair to the experience, we merely have a simple climbing simulator with very little reason to be invested in reaching the top. But seeing this story from her perspective, the different trials she faces, and the sacrifices she has to make during her journey, it simply makes you more determined to reach the top alongside her.
You can really feel the brunt of the journey when accessing a zoomed out view of the playable space, which the game lets you do at any point at the simple press of a button. Not only does this allow you to get a better view of the mountain, so you can plan out your journey up the next wall, but it also shows you the route you’ve taken so far, including any deaths and falls that you made along the way, making your progress feel meaningful. Making it to the top of a difficult wall is rewarding in itself, especially when it took you 30 minutes of real-time to try and navigate it, and that feeling really hits home when you can view all the different failures you endured to get there.
It’s a difficult game, but I never felt like that difficulty was punishing. It’s not an experience you’ll find yourself raging at. Every fall or death resulted in me being better prepared for future climbs, and I was never stuck to the point where I felt like I’d hit a wall (no pun intended). The more I played, the better at it I became, and it almost feels like the game can sense that by throwing new, unique challenges your way.
If you do end up getting stuck though, there are various options that allow you to tweak the experience so it’s easier or harder for you, such as giving you infinite climbing supplies, or removing the survival mechanics entirely. This also includes an optional hard difficulty mode which adds permadeath and removes pitons, meaning you must climb Kami without rope support while also avoiding any fatal falls.
Cairn has now become one of my favourite games of all time. I absolutely love the game’s reactive climbing mechanics, the tough-but-fair difficulty, and its entire presentation is simply gorgeous. Even though there aren’t really any changes between playthroughs, this is a game I’ll be regularly coming back to, if only to continue experiencing the thrill of the climb over and over again.
Pros: Engaging climbing mechanics, beautiful graphics, tough but fair difficulty
Cons: None
For fans of: Death Stranding, Jusant, Peak
10/10: Perfect
Cairn is out today on PC (version tested) and PlayStation 5. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.
Topics: PlayStation 5, PC, Reviews, Steam, PlayStation