"This is a thing that roguelikes and climbing games have together," says Bennett Foddy, completely unfazed by how close to death we are. "Which is that you carry the things that go badly for you. You carry them forward into your run, right?

"There's that thing that roguelike designers talk about. About how a roguelike can be 'flexible' or 'inflexible'. If it's flexible, it means that you can always turn it around to your favor and do your preferred strategy. And if it's inflexible, you have to roll with whatever happens in the randomness. And this one feels like we have to go with whatever happens, right? But I think that's maybe typical of climbing games."

What has happened is that we are all exhausted, poisoned, starving, and injured. I don't know how "flexible" or "inflexible" the others feel, but I do not feel particularly well-treated by the game's dice rolls. Holly stops us on the next ridge.

"I have an item," she says. "I don't quite know what it does. It's called Pandora's lunchbox."

There is a ripple of sound

Bennett Foddy thinks his friends might be dead. We call down to the forest floor from atop a mossy boulder and wait to see if either of our co-op climbing buddies respond.

"Yeah, sorry guys," we hear Emeric Thoa speak up. "I was being rescued by Holly because I died or fell or passed out. I don't know... I was witnessing the whole thing from my dead body."

Emeric is not dead, thankfully. But he is badly ill. Spore blasts and falls have taken their toll on his big-headed orange body, reducing his stamina meter a lot. This is where Peak's many items and gizmos may come in handy. Bandages will heal wounds, for example, while others might help with ascending unscaleable walls, such as the small circus cannon Holly Jencka has quietly stashed in her backpack. It's a familiar concept to these bleeding, aching game designers: resource management.

"There is a little bit of that in Cairn," says Emeric,

We finally reach the summit of the first mountain. Holly Jencka, Emeric Thoa and I gather by the fire as Bennett Foddy talks about random generation and orthodox versus unorthodox game design. You can tell this man is a professor. I feel like I am getting a university class for less than the thousands of pounds of debt it would otherwise cost. I forcefeed him a roast marshmallow but he keeps talking. 

Meanwhile, Holly charges towards the Roots. This is Peak's newest biome, a dense forest of spiders, poisonous mushrooms, exploding spore pods, and other fungal threats. I follow dutifully, asking more questions as random gusts of wind whip through the canopy.

The geometry and layout of every island in Peak is procedurally generated, which means some might be wildly more tough than others. Again, this devotion to randomness is something the three developers haven't necessarily pursued.

"When we started [with White Knuckle]," says Holly, "we considered: do we want to do fully procedural level generation? But it is really quite difficult. People think