As someone who fears heights and a sufferer of vertigo, I should know better, but I’ll be damned if Cairn’s experience isn’t worth every heart-skipping moment.
Cairn is a game all about the experience of extreme rock climbing, having players take on the role of Aava as she ascends an absolute monster of a mountain with nothing but her tape, her rope, and her trusty Climb Bot. This lonely journey is bookended by a developing story of why Aava is climbing, and the people left to wonder if she is safe.
Her safety, as it turns out, is completely up to you. There are a myriad of paths one can take up the mountain, and poor planning or a hectic pace is a recipe for disaster. The game truly enforces the pace, limited only by your mastery of the gangly controls of this contortionist climber. I never found myself upset at this pace, even at the slower portions, because it felt rewarding to finish a leg of this journey each time. With every section done, I got to rest, save, and manage my resources because yes, the game does have survival elements; Players must fight starvation, dehydration, and steadily dropping temperatures amidst their dangerous ascent.
So far in my play I have been pleasently surprised quite often at how much I enjoy the vibes of it all – As much as I fear heights – It turned the experience into something not to fear, but to absorb, from the beautiful stylistic graphics to the gorgeous views in the game, Cairn rewards players for making it as far as they can go and encourages you to keep going with small tidbits of conversations of Aava’s friends sending her love and sweet messages.
While the gameplay is incredibly solid, certainly intentional in how strange the controls are, the ambience is something else entirely. The music, when it’s there, is grandiose and truly tickles the brain, but the lack of music during much of the journey is strange. In its place, the audio design is a wash with the sounds of a natural living world, from running rivers and waterfalls to animal cries, rocks tumbling around you, and, to my surprise, a pretty solid underground rave locale that rewards players who go off the storied path.
The story so far in my playthrough has been a mixed experience, while initially you don’t get much at all of a background, most storytelling it done through notes and scrawls along the climb, and offered through voicemails that your friends leave for you that Climb Bot parrots; I feel the story has quite a somber undertone given the remnants of a civilization you can stumble upon, but that is something to discover in the projected 15 hours of playtime Cairn offers.
I often found myself stopping on ledges just to look at the world around me. The story was a secondary thing compared to the environment, because I just found it extremely relaxing to just soak it all in. The ambient sounds and dynamic weather add so much more to the experience, from the vibrant daylight to the torrential downpour and starry night sky. On a mechanical standpoint, all the weather affects your ability to climb, however beautiful it all might be.
Ultimately, I feel like Cairn is worth playing, if not for Aava’s Journey, then for the small dopamine hits that await you with every leg of the climb, where you can clamber up, see the sun setting over the mountain range, and pop into your tent for a cup of cocoa after a long day’s climb. What The Game Baker’s have put out is pretty solid, given the initial simplicity of the gam,e it opens up quite a bit as you get into it and get a feel for the controls, and you can grab it on Steam, Epic, GOG, and PlayStation all for around $30
Verdict: Buy It Now
