Don't Nod's latest offering, Jusant, is the story of a young person journeying out of the desert bed of a dried ocean with their cute little companion in tow, and ascending a towering rock formation on which humanity had made its home, now abandoned. It is a game about ascent, and your primary method of ascent is climbing. Jusant's aim is not to be simulationist about climbing, but it nevertheless seems to want to feel like its being simulationist about climbing. I think if you aren't familiar with climbing, it probably does. Don't expect me to have takes on many games and I don't fault you if you liked Jusant, but I'm coming at it as someone that loves to climb, and I had some thoughts.

I have been rock climbing 2-3 times a week for the better part of the last 5 years. I am not nearly as hardcore as others I know. I have had few opportunities to climb real rocks. Nevertheless it's my favourite activity that is not drawing, and I'm very immersed in its culture. When I started to see article titles pop up saying things like "Climbing Has Never Felt So Good", with regard to Jusant, my interest was piqued, to say the least. When I heard things like people saying it really felt like rock climbing I approached that statement with a healthy grain of salt. I did not go into Jusant expecting realism, but upon seeing its main locomotive mechanic I immediately burst out laughing. I will get to why in minute, but at the end of my 5 hours with the game, I couldn't shake the feeling like it had truly failed to capture, to me, why climbing is challenging, satisfying or even appealing.
I just stated that the primary movement conceit of Jusant made me burst out laughing and I should probably qualify that statement. Forgive me, but I'm about to go full Buzzfeed video where they bring on an expert to look at movie clips and say how realistic they are, for a second.
If you haven't played Jusant, when you climb, the basic climbing mechanic goes: right and left triggers are your hands' grip. When the right trigger is pushed in your right hand grips the nearest hold and it's the same on the left. Your left thumbstick controls where you are going to. When you release one of the triggers, that arm begins to reach in that direction and you then press a trigger to grab the next hold. Pretty simple. The unreality of it, that made me burst into a fit of giggles, is that it's an extremely tiring way of climbing to do this because your character is spending nearly 100% of their time climbing "locked off".

What the hell is locking off?
Put simply, it's holding yourself up by engaging the muscles in one of your arms, locking that arm in place, so that your other arm can move to a new position. It's a thing you want to spend as little time doing when climbing as you can, because the more your arms are engaged, the quicker you're going to get super tired. I want you to, for a second, imagine a orangutan climbing. What are its arms doing? There's a good chance you're picturing them long-armed hanging from a branch.

Why is that? It's because it allows the orang to rest its body weight on its skeleton, rather than on its muscles. This is way more energy efficient. Every time you have to bend your arm to pull up and reach the next thing, you are burning a ton of energy. This is why, for example, it is easier to hang from a bar than do a pull-up. Because of this you want to spend as much of your time with your arms as extended as possible. How do you do this when the aim is to go up? You use the entire rest of your body: primarily your hips, your core, your back and your legs.
This is me climbing. If you aren't familiar with bouldering in a gym setting, you follow one colour of holds (in this case, blue) starting on the marked bottom ones until you match at the top. You may see a couple things here: I try and keep my arms fully extended whenever I can, letting my legs my weight and when I do bend my arms, it is taking a ton of effort in my back to keep me on the wall.
In Jusant you do not use those parts of your body. Your balance is not important, because it makes the mistake that every new climber makes the second they try the sport: they think that climbing is done by your arms. That's why you have parts like this, where the protagonist can simply just... go up. You don't even need footholds. They can even rest while hanging one-armed straight from the roof, here.

I want to say, I actually don't fault the game for this. I had a fine time with the game. I do think there's probably a way where you could make the movement more hip and leg-based rather than all arms, but from a pure game design standpoint I get why you take it in this direction. This isn't actually why I think this game fails at being about climbing.
Back in 2018, when I actually started rock climbing, Brian David Gilbert released a min video essay on Celeste that talked about how good Celeste is at mimicking the structure of climbing, even as a 2D platformer. I think it's true, and I think Celeste actually gets way closer to the essence of what climbing feels like than Jusant does. I won't insist you watch the video, which I do think is very good and is only 3 minutes 25 seconds of your time, but Brian goes over 2 important climbing terms: beta and crux. Simply put, beta is the specific method you use to work through a problem on the wall. The crux is the hardest move to do on the climb.
Your character has effectively limitless lock-off strength and body position doesn't really matter, so the beta is always simply to go where there are holds. Where there aren't holds you're either jumping up to the next hold, doing what the climbing world calls a "dyno", or are using your little companion to affect environmental objects so that they become more holds to grab or else are is turning yourself into a pendulum using the rope, to hurl yourself towards another spot where there are more holds. It's relatively obvious where holds are positioned and what you need to in each spot, so beta is quite easy to suss out, and because of the game's approach to climbing safety, there's a good chance you'll never have to repeat it after the first go.

In Jusant you have 3 secondary pitons. These are the way that you hook your rope up to the wall. At any point in the climb you can set one of your 3 pitons and now when you fall, you only fall as far as your most recent piton. This is almost a quick save of sorts, and it's so effective, it nearly completely eliminates the idea of a crux move. I can simply put a piton in right before the hardest move and repeat only that part until its done. Jusant is designed to be a relatively casual experience and so this makes sense. I also think this is part of why it doesn't feel like climbing.
When I get up to the top of something I've climbed I feel accomplished. Climbing often takes repeated attempts. Trying different methods, repeating a move until you can get it right, slowly putting all the pieces together. Jusant isn't really interested in providing you with that kind of challenge and so when I got to the top of something I was never that psyched. I didn't feel like I did much. Even the parts I found the hardest could be completely mitigated by simply dropping a piton the second you felt that challenge mounting. When I mantle onto a ledge, I hit the button to auto wind my rope and kept looking around for something that would let me feel like I actually fought the wall.

Jusant is a pretty game. I see the concept art team and I see names I've looked up to for years: Min Yum aka bumskee is on this team. Saskia Gutekunst is on this team. You can tell the lighting team is going off. There are great vistas and the little spaces where you see human habitation are cute and fun. I should be only singing the praises on the game's visuals. So, why are the rocks so fucking boring? Most every rock you climb in the game, looks like this.

The game's world is very coral reef-inspired. Star-fish like plants, and bioluminescent tubers and big algal swathes bubbling out of surfaces. It's a myriad of textures and it all connects to the overarching story about how the ocean dried up and its very pretty and its also kinda fucking tired. I'm begging on my knees for video games to get over the idea of bioluminescent coral, lighting up its caves like the RGB strip lights of a streamer's bedroom. And because its cluttering the space with human habitation and coral and cave paintings, it isn't really paying attention to the actual rocks.

My point here is: rocks are fucking awesome. They come in so many different shapes and colours. They have immense variety. Look at how each one can present different challenges for a body attempting to ascend them. How they form natural places to hold. How they have beautiful textures and colours. Part of climbing is that we as people sometimes look at a rock and go "holy shit that rock is cool I want to get to the top of it!"
That phrase is something I keep coming back to. When I climb something and I get to the top, I feel like I'm on top. I don't just feel high up. I'm not looking for the view from part way up the tall thing. I want the view at the top of the tall thing. Jusant never gives you this. There's always the segment to climb right there. Even at the end of the game, I was not gifted my character getting to the rim of the final plateau by their own strength to look out at the world. That's not what this game was about. Jusant was about water (even the name is referring to a tidal event)... Climbing is just how you got there.

