The creative director of Cairn wants players to feel all the tension of climbing while their character clings to a granite-gray mountain face. Toes clench over a slither of rock as hands clasp a protruding crag. Each limb trembles. Listen closely and you can even hear the quickening of the mountaineer’s breath.
If a path is beyond the capabilities of Aava, the game’s protagonist, she will tumble down a sheer cliff, battered and bruised as her body hangs from the safety rope. But with each surer handhold, players can feel the exultations of real-life climbers – white-knuckle anxiety giving way to what the creative director, Emeric Thoa, calls “huge satisfaction.”
Development of Cairn, which released January 29 for the PC and PlayStation 5, started in 2020 when few games were dedicated to climbing, which has surged in popularity during the past decade. Now the burgeoning genre boasts a string of hits: the first-person climbing game Peak blew up last year, selling more than 10 million copies; the Death Stranding franchise sees players scaling massive mountains (and rappelling down them); Jusant offers an achingly poetic take on alpinism; and indie games such as Lorn’s Lure and White Knuckle deliver darker, more experimental angles on the activity.
For gamers, there is appeal in pitting oneself against a towering mass of stone. “The mountain offers a literal learning curve, a clear goal and a visual way to track your progress,” said Paolo Pedercini, a professor who teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon University.
The challenge is an essential component for this climbing cohort, bucking the safe and predictable scrambling seen in many blockbuster action games. In those titles, players tend to follow a prescribed path highlighted with conspicuous yellow markings.
Not so in Cairn. An avalanche of mathematical calculations feeds the game’s free-form movement system, which is constantly evaluating Aava’s physiological stress and which limb she is likely to move next. The gigantic massif, a fictional Mount Kami, was laboriously constructed by level designers and artists who have hand-sculpted and hand-placed every rock, ridge and tor.
Together, Cairn’s systems summon the fluidity of high-level alpinism. Static rock appears to morph with shifting body. Aava’s clambering possesses a distinct cadence, one that Thoa says is audible in each methodical button press. Within the studio’s Montpellier, France, office, one colleague may be playing Cairn while another is testing one of its faster-paced games. “If I close my eyes, I know who is playing what,” Thoa said.
The lineage of these climbing games is varied. Death Stranding and Baby Steps add greater interactive depth to the walking simulator genre of the late 2000s and early 2010s (pejoratively named because walking is the primary activity). In Jusant, little leaps of faith to reach distant handholds evoke the unforgettable jumps across the backs of steppe-scraping titans in the 2005 classic Shadow of the Colossus.
For the makers of Peak, which can be played cooperatively online, a major inspiration was the groundbreaking open-world adventure The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Petter Henriksson, a Stockholm-based designer, said he and his colleagues were influenced by Link’s ability to climb anywhere. The blond hero simply approaches any vertical surface to start climbing, limited only by a slowly decreasing stamina bar and rain that causes him to slide down newly slippery rocks.
Rain does not halt your progress in Peak, but merely slows the ascent. And unlike the mountain in Cairn, Peak’s multiple summits are not handcrafted; they are procedurally generated, the product of a carefully programmed algorithm. Chief among Henriksson’s considerations for that approach was ensuring that the mountain routes delivered sufficient challenges.
“We wanted it to feel like you have to be smart about finding a path,” he said. “We also wanted moments where you look at a climb and go, ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to make this,’ and then you do and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this.’”
It helps immersion for the mountain to appear broadly realistic, though Peak’s rock formations are lumpier and bumpier than anything in the real world. “At some point, we definitely started going in a direction where our big popcorn mountain simulator got a little bit too wacky,” Henriksson said.
While Cairn evokes the clean nobility of winter mountaineering, Peak evokes four friends going on a breezy afternoon hike, during which a poorly judged leap across a towering ravine can lead to your death.
It is this juxtaposition – between goofing around with friends and what Pedercini describes as the “godless, unforgiving” environments – that elevates the climbing experience in Peak. “You can get lost. You can follow what looks like a trail and end up at a dead end,” he said. “Peak can be truly harrowing. It’s just you and your friends against chaos.”
Thanks to powerful modern computers, both larger teams and solo developers are now able to render 3D space with hardly any technical limitations. The sheer hugeness of Mount Kami in Cairn evokes the world’s largest peaks like K2. Even bigger, stranger and more expressive is the world in Lorn’s Lure, where the climbing takes place within a vast subterranean megastructure. The space is unfathomably deep, though Toronto-based designer Radu Nicolae prefers not to reveal its precise dimensions. He merely confirms that it plunges downward for miles and miles, and then keeps going for many more.
Nicolae, a former parkour runner, envisions the player as a “tiny ant in a car engine,” leaping between ledges in a space he conceives of as “visual poetry.” Like other climbing games, Lorn’s Lure, released in 2024, delivers the thrill of traveling somewhere rarefied and out of reach while also subverting it; the vistas here are dark and gloomy, more likely to inspire dread than wanderlust.
You do not need to have exceedingly strong fingers or a stomach for heights to enjoy these games. Regardless of setting or style, they suggest that everyone is a climber, seeking to convert the environment before them into a symbolic system of self-expression.
So open-ended is the climbing in Cairn that each route up Mount Kami is unique. With every leap, precarious pivot and nervous shimmy, players explore the limits of both vertiginous structure and themselves. It is an emotional journey mapped onto physical terrain.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.