Three game devs climb a mountain - part 3

Holly Jencka stuffs girl scout cookies into Bennett Foddy's mouth. She turns and marches on, looking at a rickety-looking rope bridge ahead of us.

"Okay," she says. "We should only do this bridge one at a time... because they have a tendency of collapsing."

We make it over one by one. If we'd tried crossing all at once the bridge would possibly give way under the combined weight of our cartoonishly large heads. It's good to have Holly here, someone who has played Peak more than the rest of us. But this kind of high-stakes multiplayer camaraderie, sometimes lovingly referred to as "friendslop", isn't actually a factor in the games created by these developers. They all make single player stuff. That means their own games feel quite different.

"That sense of isolation adds a lot to the somber mood I think a lot of climbing games have," says Holly. "This game, you don't really feel it, because you're goofing off with three other people but... I think any of the games all of us have made you get this melancholy at points, as you look out over everything that you've climbed."

While making Cairn, that solitude was also important. Emeric and his fellow developers nixed the idea of a two-person climb (which in reality is a standard practice for "safe" alpinism) and instead introduced a different kind of companion.

"We invented this little climb-bot," says Emeric, as he skirts around a poisonous thorn bush. "The robot that brings the rope and pitons, so that you could feel the loneliness, dedication, determination of a single person."

Baby Steps might be the exception here. Its tone is less melancholy and more absurd. The solitude of the climb is broken again and again by talkative bystanders who make awkward chit-chat. As much as the player character Nate may want to be left alone, he often runs into company. But Bennett says this comedic angle of the game wasn't always the plan. It was originally meant to be a little bleak.

"I had a vision for Baby Steps that was a lot more in that kind of tone originally," he says. "There were scenarios that I wanted that were more in that lonely isolated feeling. But it felt a little bit too much like Dark Souls when we actually had it like that. And I love Dark Souls, but I feel like they kind of got there already with the mood. And so we went a slightly different way after a while."

A single trail of smoke rises just over the next rise - a campfire, a resting spot, a respite. Holly runs ahead of us, still leading the way.

"I'm always saying Baby Steps is the Dark Souls of physics-based movement games," she says.

The real Peak starts here. Come back to Jank for the next part tomorrow