Don’t Nod is most famous these days for making the Life Is Strange series, but it has spent the last few years taking the goodwill and resources from the massive success of those games to make a ton of markedly different games. One such game is Jusant, a game about a boy with the singular goal of climbing an impossibly high mountain. There is no combat and I’m pretty sure there’s no dialogue either. All you do is climb. I love games that focus on a thing and make it the most entertaining, challenging, and all-consuming version of it possible, and that’s how I feel about climbing in Jusant. After decades of playing through video game setpieces, it’s pretty easy to see through the artifice of scenarios designed to rouse me. I’m rarely, if ever, on the edge of my seat, muscles and jaw tightened due to the sheer exhilaration of a sequence. I was in that state for the entirety of my time with Jusant though. You can feel the thrills of surmounting the highest peak, too, by picking up Jusant for $16.24.
