I’ve fallen, yet again, from a seemingly impossible cliff face in Cairn. I’m at the game’s first major skill check, and as I watch Aava, the player-protagonist, plummet down the side of the mountain, we let out twin screams of frustration. I set my controller on the desktop and wonder if I should reload the save file to start the ascent with my precious food and boost resources restocked to when I made the initial attempt.
I flick through the pause menu to restart the game when I see accessibility options at the bottom of the Gameplay page. I am a stubborn, able-bodied player, so I hesitate before selecting some. A warning flashes that “Cairn is intended to be difficult,” which, to my hubris-addled brain, reads as a taunt. I don’t select any options now, but I do reload the save file. Forty minutes and several failures later, I again read through the accessibility options, of which there are many, and I reluctantly choose “Rewind Time” and “No survival”, which pauses the survival meters from shrinking. I make the climb on the next attempt. In my self-flagellating shame, I promptly turn off all assist toggles, only to recheck “Rewind Time” once more later on.
I won’t say that Cairn is the “Dark Souls of climbing games” because that’s ridiculous, and the joke has long overstayed any welcome it may have had. However, I will say that playing this game in parallel to a full Platinum run of Bloodborne in my spare time has taught me an awful lot about myself, with my pride being the primary victim of my self-reflection.
Instead, I will state that Cairn is my personal Wanderstop, a game I couldn’t manage to play for more than five hours straight and that begs you to slow down as you make non-linear progress through a confined space. Wanderstop is a game whose design I simultaneously adored and quickly grew bored of. The lack of gamified elements or goals ultimately did me in, and I learnt about myself that I need clear goals to motivate me. Cairn’s approach is the other extreme, where the tiniest details require optimised strategy to make the most incremental progress toward the peak of the in-game mountain, Kami, even if that means going sideways, or, god forbid, downwards, before continuing upwards.
For fellow players whose default logic is to “play harder, not smarter”, then Cairn may be the Wanderstop you need.
After successfully summiting Kami in some twelve hours, I am tempted to convert this review into a tip list, but more fittingly, I expect that this analysis will be a guide along the path toward self-discovery and a sense of bittersweet victory.
Gameplay is straightforward: it’s you and the mountain. However, this is anything but simple. Cairn starts out in a large recreation room lined with climbing walls. You’re instructed on the basics: identify a reliable hold on the wall, reach out with a single limb, click one button to grab, and pray your grip will bear your weight as you spider your way upwards. The walls aren’t all that challenging, as they shouldn’t be, since they serve to tutorialise the basics. Maybe there’s a false sense of ease there.
Once you’re out on Kami, a mountain spoken about in hushed reverence since it hasn’t been successfully summited before, the alpine environment contrasts sharply with the interior of the training room. Angling your camera upwards, there’s a whole lot of ground to cover from the base to the peak. Good luck.
The cell-shaded art style here is not just a fantastic artistic choice, but it makes the rock walls reveal their cracks and pockets where you can slot your fingers or toes in as you make your ascent. I found myself looking in every direction for texture on the rocks, even those that seemed contradictory to my goals to progress to engineer possible paths upwards. There’s an invisible stamina meter, and if you exhaust it, Aava will lose grip and fall backwards either to the ground or the last piton you drilled into the rockface.
Most of your cues come from Aava’s increasingly erratic breathing, limbs shaking from overexertion, and panicked yelps. While these serve well as indicators to signal that you’re moments from plunging toward a setback, it was difficult to identify if a hold you had was solid or not. Oftentimes I would find myself with a calm, steadily breathing Aava, and after two shifts, seconds later she would be shaking wildly only to drop suddenly without any real feedback as to why I had lost control.
When Aava’s in a full-on panic, the game will automatically shift to the limb that most desperately needs a better grip. More often than not, I could not immediately identify which limb this was or assumed it was the hand or foot I had most recently placed. Frantically, I’d entered a sudden death round of vertical Twister, with Aava’s body contorted and knotted, writhing like something possessed before instantly dropping. I had a few remarkable saves, primarily by slamming the button to add chalk grip to my hands and scrambling to a nearby ledge, but those felt less like victories and more like desperate, against-all-odds scraps to safety.
But even in the tamer sections, whenever there was a slip-up, you could be seconds from losing ten minutes or more of progress. There’s never really a moment to let your guard down. Cairn has a remarkable magnetism in the climbing mechanics for when you aim a hand or foot at a crack to get better grip and boost yourself upwards. The constant tension comes down to thousands of microscopic moments in which you’ll stretch for a ledge you know is safe, rely on one foot to rearrange your entire trajectory, or screw in a piton at the last moment to save yourself from a tumble. But sometimes that magnetism pulled me in an unexpected way and disrupted progress. I had to force myself to remain calm, otherwise I would end up like the many, many skeletons you’d step over on the path up Kami.
Thankfully, in the gameplay settings, there’s the option to turn on a setting that gives you a visual indication whenever you get a good grip on a surface, and it makes a world of difference. A small white box will flash over your hand or foot where you locked in. This setting is in a separate category outside of the assist mode toggles, so fellow masochistic players, you’re guilt-free enabling it.
Part of Cairn’s difficulty stems from resource management and the careful balancing of survival game meters on top of the sheer difficulty of the cliffs. You’ve got restricted inventory space. After all, a lighter pack means an easier climb. There are limited times in which you can consume the majority of healing and food items. Luckily, at any part of the climb, you can apply climbing chalk or drink some water. You’ll have to drill a piton into a cliff surface (though some are too dense to drill into, mind that) and off belay to utilise anything else while climbing, and pitons are uncommon but breakable. I found myself spending more and more time planning routes zigzagging toward unseeable ledges, where I would hope for respite. Getting caught without a plan is a surefire way to lose progress.
Fellow item hoarders, Cairn will test your resolve to hold on to your more precious resources. I counted at least five major skill checks, and upon completion of every single one, I was nearly out of all stock. At the game’s end, you’ll want some bigger boosts up your sleeve, as the final ascent to Kami’s peak is one hell of a gauntlet.
To compensate for demanding so much of your inventory, Cairn can be generous too, with items scattered about the mountain. Exploration is well rewarded with extra food rations or items that you can cook with water for a hearty meal. Sometimes you’d find a map pieced together from past travellers, oftentimes in their remains, that provided priceless information about climbs ahead. There’s a surprisingly massive breadth of save locations, cutscenes, and history carved into Kami. You can engage with this history and its cultural legacy as much as you want; it seemed endless. If you’re dedicated solely to the climb, you’ll want to take a breather and walk around a bit just to scrounge up anything that can help you, but especially water sources, to keep apace of the mountain’s cruelties.
Your robot companion, Climbot, is also a recycling machine, so as you compost packaging from used consumables Climbot will churn out climbing chalk, arguably the most used item in my playtime. At your bivouac sites, which are Cairn’s safe checkpoints, you’ll be able to prepare food for future climbs. There aren’t many recipes beyond heating up soup and infusing herbs into water. I found basic crafting to be a good break to counter the gruelling moment-to-moment decision-making while climbing well.
While there’s not much to go on at the onset of the climb, Aava’s story slowly comes into focus as cutscenes play at various bivouac locations or other sites of interest. She’s got a tough exterior and, frankly, a tough interior too. This quality has its virtues, as Aava is determined, capable, and resourceful, and she’s got grit. When the going’s rough, she’ll press well beyond her own abilities, which is saying something about Kami since she is a world-class alpinist.
But Aava is closed off to others, and it’s clear that there’s more than just introversion at play here. She, understandably, bristles at her agent Chris, who demands regular updates, photos, and general check-ins to appease sponsors and curious mountaineers waiting for news at home about her climb. She’s not about that. She’s interested in Kami. When several other calls are relayed to her Climbot, she listens intensely but quickly sets aside anything that may rattle her resolve. Aava has a partner back home, and for spoilers’ sake, I’ll just say that it’s difficult to be attentive when you’re not there.
I really didn’t know what to make of Aava. I think she’s a well-written character, with a multi-dimensional personality and plenty of plot events that challenge her motives and allow her to grow and change. As she journeys forward, in my playtime, there was no crack in her exterior, and I constantly felt outside of her character. I grew to pity her, feeling sympathy for her reckless, increasingly selfish pursuit toward summiting Kami, yet I celebrated when we reached the peak. It takes an indestructible grit to cross the finish line of Cairn. Physically, sitting to rest at the peak was undeniably rewarding, and I sat awash with relief. But emotionally, it was a pyrrhic victory. While we shared many, many setbacks and frustrations together, as the player I felt pushed away from forming a closer connection with her. At the game’s end, I felt as though I had formed more of a trauma bond with Aava than something significant or personal. Cairn is about Aava and Kami, not the player.
Upon reflection, I appreciate this kind of writing and character. People are flawed and often will give in to their passions over other people. Aava’s imperfections, most notably her stubbornness, should resonate with players like me who need humbling. Maybe it’s better to use a summon than slog against a boss for hours, or several game sessions, on end. Maybe you could save a lot of time by lowering the difficulty a notch. Maybe you’re proving something to yourself that doesn’t need to be proven. Maybe you’d get more sleep.
Cairn is bittersweetness gamified. There’s an underlying anger coupled with stalwart resolve baked deep into the game’s foundation beautifully manifested in its methodic and taxing rhythms. There are payoffs, entangled with self-reflection and bitter losses. You’ll be whipped by a gale against a cliff and then nestled in an old cavern, finding peace with a warm cup of lentils. You’ll tape your fingers again and again and again, watching the cuts on your fingers grow wider and deeper, watching for scars to form and mark them until they’re rough like Aava’s face and spirit. But you’ll learn a lot about how you tackle challenges, and reassess how you are defined by the ways you push yourself, and maybe wonder if pushing yourself further creates a distance too great to walk back.
