Video game climbing is a deceptive affair. Rarely is it the centrepiece gameplay mechanic: often it’s barely more than a one-button means for Nathan Drake to get to the next shooty bit. A traversal mode for getting across Florence or Damascus in a hurry, akin to a car in the sense that you just press the button to turn it on and point it when you want to go. The System takes care of the rest. Yes, I’m being reductive, and dismissive of the fact that Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, and any other Climby Games you’d want to mention usually have a few tricky puzzles where being good at prodding The System is crucial, but games rarely get your palms sweaty searching for the next handhold.
Not so with Jusant. The entire game is centred around finding the next handhold. Figuring out how to scale surface A to reach objective B. It starts off simple: each trigger corresponds to a hand, depressing them makes the hands grip, the left stick moves them around. It’s much more involved than pressing X to fasten Nathan Drake securely to an outcrop, but no less intuitive. And then you go up.
And you keep going up. Because this is The Tower, Jusant’s mammoth location in which the entire game takes place, save for the opening sequence that fades up on a scorching hot former sea bed. The “why” doesn’t take shape until a number of hours later, after you’ve read countless world-building notes left behind in the ruins of The Tower’s quasi-mediterranean civilization. But it’s enough at first to know that, in the spirit of Yazz, the only way is up. Well, sometimes you have to go across a bit. But the trend is skyward.