Three game devs climb a mountain - part 2

In Peak, you reach out your hands to grab onto surfaces. Holding left click against a wall or a tree sees you climb, but your stamina bar will drain quickly. Thankfully, players can offer an arm to hoist up a fellow climber in a difficult spot. You'll need to boost and help each other out a lot to reach the summit. It's a good thing the three game developers I have roped into this horrendous jaunt seem to be good at working together.

"I think when you talk about climbing, you're talking about a very strenuous sort of activity," says Holly, plucking fruit from a shrub growing on the side of a cliff and pocketing it for a future snack. "You're talking about this very physical thing. And giving your player character a physical body that obeys some rules of reality helps the feeling of climbing become more real in a sense, right?"

Over the course of a climb in Peak, your stamina bar will become afflicted with all sorts of clutter that reduces how much energy you have - injuries, burns, sleepiness - all reducing how much distance you can clamber. It's designed to make you feel like you have a limited human body.

"It's no longer just holding a button to go up, like Assassin's Creed or something like that. It's you responding to the environment in a very naturalistic way."

Holly's dark climbing game, White Knuckle, plays with stamina by giving the player two distinct hands, both of which will slowly get redder and redder with strain the longer each one must grip onto bars or ledges. In Cairn, meanwhile, the player can use a piton to anchor themselves to the side of a mountain and rest their body, preparing for the next upwards push.

You might be forgiven for thinking developers of such games would be deep into mountain climbing. But while some workers in each studio are interested in the sport, my three subjects here are not hugely into it. For Emeric, developing Cairn is more about answering a question: what makes somebody do something so dangerous and painful in the first place?

"I tried climbing a little to get the feel, but for me it's... For me it's fascinating. I've practiced martial arts and boxing and stuff that is perceived as painful or violent. I've done a lot of skiing or some other extreme sports, but I would never do climbing for real. Because it's super painful. It's a lot of effort for not so much...

"Especially alpinism. Going to the gym and climbing for fun - that I can understand. But alpinism, you sacrifice so much... That was exciting to me. To work on that crazy obsession that they have, these people."

Baby Steps, on the other hand, is only tangentially about climbing. Technically, it's more a hiking simulator.

"I hike, but I have too much of a fear of heights for real climbing," says Bennett, as he navigates a narrow ledge over a 100 foot drop. "Uh, so this is a nice way to play with that."

Stay with us Jankers, there's more to come in the next part...