Note: This is for the controller orientation for Peaks of Yore.

Peaks of Yore is a deceptive little game, offering a relaxing period piece with straightforward and satisfying challenges and instead coming away with imprecise and unintuitive brutality.

The player is an intrepid climber setting out to conquer the peaks of the The Great Gales in 1887. Starting out with a couple simple peaks and a tutorial on grabbing rocks and swinging it can seem like the player has everything they need to succeed but most skills required will require not only pouring through a bunch of user-made movement videos but very frustrating trial and error. Jumps and swings feel very unsatisfying after the first couple of peaks, and arcane movement trickery such as the "s-jump" (holding back then up to swing up) becomes mandatory to advance.

There are a lot of items at the player's disposal (safety ropes, chalk for timed grips, coffee for a boost) that seem fair as well as a safety harness if the player feels like they need to "give up" a peak and reuse ropes on the way up, but a lot of these items only come after the player really needs them, forcing many moments of frustrating struggle only to seem simple once the player gets better items later. This includes a crampon for sticking to walls that results in extremely finnicky and difficult to control wall jumps that are absolutely mandatory to advance, especially for avoiding some of the game's most unfun obstacles.

And what unfun obstacles there are! Seagulls toss the player off their grip (note: bird seed was introduced in a later update but doesn't come up till much later in the game), slippery grips are imprecise and inconsistent (the key is not to grab the edges but hands will slip off at wildly different speeds and sometimes phase through the rocks), timed grips throw off patient thinking and later levels feature ice sheets with even worse feeling momentum once the icepicks are unlocked. Most of the game feels less like climbing I wanted to interact with and more like crazy parkour stunts to involve interacting with what could be a fatal mistake. The first "book" of peaks seems reasonable and while repeating janky segments is frustrating there should be enough safety rope to slowly strategize getting by, but once the intermediate boulders with limited item use come in and the absolutely exhausting advanced and expert peaks (especially Solemn Tempest) come in the player feels trapped to have to frustratingly grind out those last few peaks or resort to the harness. What would be a satisfying challenge feels unforgivable with the mix of terrible feeling controls and janky physics interactions.

The look and sound of the game is deceptively charming, putting on a relaxing atmosphere of friendly Scottish individuals and simple pixelated monochrome graphics. The latter can actually severely impact your visibility so it's encouraged to turn on a more colorful mode in the options. Most of the music can be found in the cabin and in the main menu, with cozy old fashioned tunes to jazz out to.

Peaks of Yore is a game that pretends to be inviting and relaxing but only invites stress, frustration, and tedium in many instances. Near the end I was more satisfied to be done with peaks and never touch them again instead of feeling the urge to master them, and I feel like I should have stopped earlier instead of letting the game's reputation pressure me into the incredibly exhausting final peaks. Who knows, it could just be that all the keyboard players are having a blast?