Three game devs climb a mountain - part 5

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, slowly walking into fierce winds. "You're getting thirsty and hungry and cold. So it requires you to keep moving and getting some resources, and also the pitons - they're getting used... So eventually it builds up some tension, where you are in a situation where you only have two pitons and it's a long wall and you have to plan where you're going to use them."

I want to know more about this - the balance of resource management with the physical act of climbing. But I only get halfway through my next question before Bennett gets hoisted into the air by a spider.

He is soon dropped from a dizzying height, and badly wounded.

"Here, there's a medicinal root," says Holly, plucking a vegetable from the ground nearby. "I can heal you up a bit."

She pushes the purple root vegetable into Bennett's face. The vegetable begins screaming. It is as loud as a leafblower and almost as sinister.

"It's a mandrake! It's a mandrake!" yells Holly, dropping it at once. We all run away, our stamina meters now afflicted with purple sleepiness. A gust of wind blows the vegetable away into the forest. I make a note. My interviewees are being slowly defeated by weather and parsnips. We start to talk about survival games (one of Cairn's inspirations was The Long Dark, says Emeric).

"Survival games," says Bennett, "metaphorically, they're climbing games, aren't they? At least I feel like, emotionally, they're similar. In the sense that you're trying to build up your resources to where it's easy to survive, and you can lose that progress in the same way as you can lose progress in a climbing game."

He looks back downhill and sees Holly and Emeric lying on the ground in a heap.

"Oh no, you both died."

But Holly soon wakes up. It was only a brief dizzy spell from trying to hoist an unconscious and badly poisoned Emeric onto her back. Everyone is periodically passing out from a mixture of starvation, bruising, and toxic spore poisoning. Holly feeds a mushroom to Emeric's unconscious body. It seems to satisfy his hunger. He also explodes in everyone's face.

Miraculously, we eventually find a way to recover from this painful moment of intense flatulence and heal everyone up, at least a little. We are hurt badly, we have made little progress, and we are totally lost on the forest floor. We only have a few bits of kit left and time is running out. Holly decides we must push on.

The disaster will continue in part six...