When we talk about video games, we often do so in the context of verbs. It’s an obvious knock-on effect of humanity inventing its first truly interactive artform: To engage meaningfully with a game, you must do, whether that means running, jumping, shooting, puzzling, sliding, double-jumping, shooting some other things, or eating adorable little dog creatures whole. (I’ve been playing the Switch 2 version of Kirby And The Forgotten Land this week, so dog vore’s on the mind.) Most of these verbs have found themselves pretty much locked down over 50 years of gaming, to the point that it’s now mildly revolutionary when a game makes a whole meal out of, say, running—think Bennett Foddy’s QWOPat the far extreme, or Death Stranding 2or Mirror’s Edge for more mainstream variations on making players think about the work of putting one foot in front of the other. And then, there’s climbing.
Climbing is having a moment in gaming: Peak, the latest game from Another Crab’s Treasureteam Aggro Crab and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator‘s Landfall, is sitting high atop the Twitch charts, having ascended there on the back of its goofy, surprisingly rigorous depiction of the basic problems of Getting Up There. Twitch is a natural home for the studio’s latest, because Peak has a lot to offer both players and viewers alike, most especially in terms of comedy: The game’s inherently cooperative nature makes for moments where it’s easy to be deliciously uncooperative. (There’s a reason every banana one of your goofy-looking, balloon-headed scouts chows down on leaves a temptingly slippery peel you can leave in a buddy’s path, possibly sending them ass over teakettle right back down the slopes.) But it also makes for genuinely thrilling play (and viewing), because it taps into the inherent tensions of climbing, gaming’s tensest verb.
There is, after all, a reason that Nintendo’s most successfully drastic reinvention of its Legend Of Zelda games, 2017’s Breath Of The Wild, eschewed simple yellow-painted handholds or improbably placed ladders and made climbing an active, ubiquitous task: Both its rewards, and its dangers, are baked directly into the act. The human urge to see What’s Up There, Huh? is literally axiomatic; even if a developer hasn’t hidden any goodies at the top of that mountain/tree/giant colossus you sent your character skittering up, the sheer act of successfully getting to the top of something that looked too big to climb carries its own potent psychological reward. And the horrors of the fall are just as easy to grasp (or, uh, not). Speaking of Foddy, he invented a whole little mini-genre of deliberately pain-in-the-ass platformers with his indie hit Getting Over It, rooted most especially in those hideous emotional moments in between when you realize you’ve fucked up a jump, and the steady plummet back to the very beginning of the game. Falling in climbing-focused video games doesn’t just do damage or kill you: It robs you of hard-fought progress, leeching the spent time straight out of your bones. It’s both a terrible threat and the funniest thing that can happen to someone trying to scale a digital peak.
And in between these two extremes—the rush of a successful ascent and the stomach- (and also “all of you”) dropping sensation of the plummet, is the basic tension: Staring at a wall and asking yourself, “Can I make it?” This, ultimately, is why Peak is both a great game, and a great viewing experience. The title has numerous mechanics for determining whether players can survive the ascent, from negatives—hunger, weather, weight, and other factors that make your precious stamina drain faster—to positives like tools, buffs, or, most importantly of all, the presence of a friend to help lend you a hand. (The relief of having a buddy extend a stubby lil’ limb to haul you up the last few deadly inches of a poorly judged climb is matched only by the satisfaction of being the savior in question.) But some of my most intoxicating moments with the game came from climbs where I’d gotten separated from my team, and shorn of equipment: When it was just my eye, and my judgment, trying to figure out if I could manage that next, potentially fatal leap. The act of commitment that follows, when there is no back anymore, only the heaven of up or the hell of down, is the stuff of literal cliffhangers. Hanging from the ledge, hearing the distant yells of my companions as they navigate their own chunks of the mountain, I was as engaged with the actual play of a video game as I have been at any point in recent memory. And that’s the beautiful, incredible, simple thrill nestled at the heart of this latest spate of climbing games: You either make it. Or you fall.
