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Pretty Good Hat

I am so looking forward to this game: Cairn is a realistic-ish climbing game with a layer of survival and resource management mechanics, and it feels really good to play, right down to the calming breath from a bomber hold to the Elvis-leg twitching you get from holding too long on a sketchy, fatigued toe edge.

Screenshot of a climber on a steep face, viewed from above. She is leading a rope down into the shadow of the white and gray cliff, to a little robot belayer.

After a hard pitch, you can roll out your little bivvy sack, cook some instant noodles with your ultralight stove, and sleep with a view of the stars. It’s delightful and a perfect depiction of dirtbag climber downtime.

Screenshot from the game Cairn, showing a climber sleeping in a tent. Her harness is hung by the opening and a small stove hangs from the frame. It looks cozy and messy, a perfect dirtbag climber scene. Through the window and open flap is a distant mountain range.

You have to manage food, water, and consumables like climbing chalk that give you a temporary boost, and at one point in the demo I had to rappel all the way down several crags to fill my water bottles and spend my meager few coins on a packet of fruit chews – I just hoped it would fill my energy meter enough to get back to, and then finish, the final long pitch of the climb. I had barely enough food energy to make it to the top, and when I finally topped out, doubled over from the effort, exhaustion and hunger, it felt like an amazing triumph.

Screenshot from Cairn, showing my climber, having reached the top of a high cliff, doubled over from fatigue and pain. The view is from above and shows her lead rope trailing down a narrow chimney of rock, with ledges receding into the far distance.

I knew this game sounded familiar, and I found Riley MacLeod’s great writeup of the demo from a couple months back, which I’m sure I read at the time. The demo now has a mode that lets the player somewhat-gracefully select the limb to move, which I found I needed when I got myself into tricky, awkward positions on the wall. This game looks like something special and I can’t wait for its full release to see how it handles things like expedition-length trips – route finding for resupply drops, heck yes! – and what it does with the hints of story found in the demo.

Cairn screenshot showing a craggy set of cliffs. The cliffs are illustrated with dotted lines of multiple colors showing routes that I took up and down them. Screenshot from the game Cairn, looking up at a stone cliff where a climber hangs from a rope.