Jusant (2023)

Loved the music, atmospherics, vistas... the poignant glimpses into the lives of people inhabiting a dying world. It reminded me of Ico a little bit, in that it is light on extraneous narrative details that aren't necessary to be transported and experience emotions through the observations of the main character whose name is (unless I missed something) not in evidence.

As I proceeded through the narrative I found myself getting increasingly frustrated by a maddening lack of details: how did the world come to be like this, where are all the people, where did my character come from and what's their role in this and what are they trying to accomplish here, what exactly do they know or think they know? And then I got to the end and realized I knew everything I needed to know and the rest was noise that would have distracted from what I was looking at.

Videogames about climbing tend to be frustrating in my experience. They often aim to frustrate with irritating control schemes and loss of progress by falling. Jusant instead claims to offer a "meditative journey" that's more concerned with slowly expanding on its core climbing mechanics as you absorb a simple story about climate change.

While the game has a great calm vibe to it, I don't think I'd go so far as to call it meditative. The climbing controls and mechanics are simultaneously too simple and too complex for me. The protagonist is pretty good at finding footholds without much manual input so you can really just hold a direction on the joystick and alternate triggers to climb easily. But as the game added more mechanics-- rocks that are actually little bugs and move, powerful winds, etc. I found myself wishing it wouldn't. I kind of wanted it to lean more into the challenge of finding that next foothold instead of looking to add more ways to force me to engage with timed jumps.

Jusant's artstyle is joyfully vibrant and really succeeds at providing environments that effectively convey the variety of weather conditions one runs into as they climb the tower. If I were to critique its presentation for anything, it'd be that I don't feel there are enough opportunities to look back down at where you climbed up from. One of the simple joys of climbing is being able to see how far you've come and this game failed to provide that for me. Because each chapter in the game feels disconnected from the others there's never an opportunity to look down the tower to see where you started. But I don't want to let that take away from how gorgeous this game is.

Here are some other rapid-fire points that spring to mind:

• The creature that travels with you, the Ballast, is adorable. I think they just made a plush of him and I wouldn't mind having one...
• Movement when walking and jumping can be a bit buggy. The devs didn't want you to be able to walk off cliff edges so they lock movement when they think you're about to. The detection sometimes picks up when you're just walking around the odd baubles in the environment though and you'll get temporarily stuck in place. I fear it may be possible to get permastuck in places as a result but thankfully this didn't happen.
• The story is fine, but largely told through often-lengthy notes scattered about the environment. This has always felt like a lazy and tiresome way of storytelling to me in videogames, even if we have the justification of a postage system in this world.
• The mechanics the game introduces are decent in and of themselves, even if I wish it had stayed a bit more simple overall. They feel like meaningful expansions on the core climbing.

Preface: This is going to be incredibly ramble-y and I apologize in advance for that. These are notes I took whilst playing the game: occasionally alt tabbing out of the game to attempt to put my feelings towards the game into words. I'm too busy right now to convert it into a cohesive and flowing essay.

Its about how the lives of people are transcribed and etched onto the material world. In Jusant, you’re not merely ‘climbing a mountain.’ More often than not, you are (re)discovering, exploring, and traversing the fossilization of people’s very lives. Rock surfaces carved into cozy and majestic spaces serving different social and human needs, a material reflecting of the human condition. Exploring this world feels like I’m walking among the ghosts of what (and who) once was (were); the only remnants of those who existed before being their labor: the etchings of their lives in gravel and limestone. The material space their lives carved out; manifested in the hollowing of the mountain into structures recognizable as homes; furniture; plazas/squares; community hubs, etc. In Jusant, You get such a clear window how people lived even in their complete absence. It walks the tightrope between loneliness and community in such an interesting way. I think the ‘audio shells’ are the best example of this—moments were you just taking in the ambiance of what once was, and what continues to be despite and irrespective of its supposed absence.

Jusant is about:

• The physical impact (and I’m using that term as literally as I can) of human life once it is gone;
• Finding peace in loneliness;
• Its about the concept of life and nourishment; and the responsibility of future generations to eulogize that which occurred;
• Recognizing and accepting the past, and carving out an existence of your own. After all, throughout your own journey, you leave behind markers of your own existence, of your presence in this space. As you are traversing the world, you leave your footprints: quite literally in some sense as you climb these various structures and rocky hills, but also in the stuff you leave behind. The pitons are one good example. Another are the life you bring back to the various plant life. It is all evidence of our existence, and will exist long after we are gone and dust.

In that same logic, objects like this very text are things that will live on and signify my existence once I too, am gone. I don’t know. Jusant just feels so… otherworldly. And yet so familiar…

I had high hopes after playing the demo a while back. Climbing games are starting to be A Thing now and this one looked beautiful and polished.

The full game is indeed gorgeous, with lovely landscapes and levels full of environmental details that flesh out the world of the game. In terms of story, I really liked the worldbuilding. I loved seeing the various parts of the tower and understanding what they did and how they functioned. There is some attempts at global warming commentary but it's kind of clunky.

Now, the developers claim their game "wordlessly" tell a story. They are lying. The main story delivery system is the usual random documents and scattered letters and they are wordy as all get out. Each one is multiple paragraphs long and by the halfway point I was barely glancing at them.

The devs also claim that "the gameplay can be hard to master". This is not a lie, but it's misleading. Indeed it's hard to master the gameplay, but it's mostly because the controls are full of small little issues. I was constantly getting stuck in the geometry and jumping is completely unreliable. Sometimes my character would jump without me releasing the jump button, sometime they would jump away from the rock instead of upward. There are a lot of invisible walls and obstacles that should be climable but aren't. All these little issues prevented me from taking in the world and I was mostly fighting the controls instead of enjoying the gorgeous vistas or piecing together the narrative.

Gameplay also doesn't evolve much beyond what you get in the first chapter. While at first it feels like you have to pay attention to your hands and attachment points, I quickly realised that for the most part I could point the left stick to the direction of climb and mindlessly alternate left and right trigger to go.

So while I liked a lot of the elements, I feel that the game mostly fails at what it attempts to do.

Jusant is a very beautiful game that tells a simple story about a strange world in a pretty effective way. Details are dripped in via letters and shells that remember the times that came before and you're allowed to piece things together from written dialogues of the past. Most of the video game exists in the in-between of these sections, while you walk around the environments finding the next wall to climb to take you to the next area to run around, find clues, and then find the next wall to climb to take you to the next area and... This is most of the game, and if you come into Jusant looking for just a climbing game it's pretty decent at that, minus the times anything animation-based the way this is can completely crumple and break if you push it too hard. It's a climbing game with a light dressing of a story, and I would have definitely preferred a more even ratio considering how it took me one area to get a handle on the climbing and the next 5 areas were just repeating that with very little additions to mix it up. The things they do add are generally good! But there's really not that many and any that are brought in tend to not last very long. In fact, instead of a final climb that combines everything you've learned on the journey thus far, it pretty much tosses that out in favour of an extremely drab and tedious vertical climb.

While the letters were rewarding to find, the altars. murals and rock formations absolutely were not. Yet the altars and murals appear on your Gamer Vision and not the letters? I didn't think this was a great choice especially when the letters can be easy to miss in the pretty busy environments.

The reliance on environmental storytelling is neat, and I do appreciate that they went for it, but even though I understood exactly what the story was going for and about by the end, the game really did feel like 90% climbing and 10% story. Fundamentally to enjoy the game properly you just need to enjoy the climbing a lot more than I did, which I was really only ever just OK on. I think it has the idea of being meditative and calming and precise in the beginning, but you can just blast through every single wall by just holding in a direction and alternating LT + RT and it will do everything for you. Most of it just felt like playing Uncharted in a manual car. Mash the triggers until you stop and then jump and keep going and you can do most of the game without having to look at the screen.

The most interesting part of Jusant was the penultimate area of the game that has a really fantastic ending to it, but then you just sit there confused when the credits don't start playing and you have to keep going. It really sucks a lot of the air out of what was a pretty fantastic victory lap. I hope DONTNOD try more experimental stuff like that, but I think I would have wanted the game to have a good edit where they focus on the strengths (Bianca letters, delivering ongoing plots via the world itself) instead of the weaknesses.

After playing this, climbing in Genshin Impact and Tears of the Kingdom suddenly feels extremely boring. This is an amazing example of how a mechanic usually used as "filler" in other games (how else could you describe it in Tomb Raider or Uncharted?) can be intriguing and deep when the devs give it some love.

Also, this game is a metaphor for global warming. Its really obvious and I've seen very few comment about it.

You can read my full review in spanish here. Is very positive.

More AA games like this please.

The only other game I've played that made me feel somewhat accomplished for climbing was the first Assassin's Creed game back in 2007, and this game took that to a whole new level.

From the moment I saw the trailer that had the unique climbing mechanics, I was interested and wanted to keep it on my radar. When I first started the game, I was like, "Ok, this is kinda fun but it's a little too simple..." but I was wrong! Don't Nod had many clever ideas to keep the gameplay fresh and challenging enough that you had to think, but not too challenging that it became frustrating. The music was also a delight to listen to throughout the playthrough. The art style was simple yet beautiful, and the different biomes featured throughout the game were unique and interesting.

I never would have played this game without Xbox PC Game Pass, so thank you! Do yourself a favor and play this game!

I really enjoyed this game. Like, I think, a lot of people, I have been feeling somewhat overwhelmed lately. So when I heard about this game coming out and saw the demo, I knew I had to play this. I was not disappointed. The game looks absolutely gorgeous and has some of the best character animation (of the one character) I have seen. The music is atmospheric and synthy in the best way.

But the big thing; gameplay: I will not say this is perfect. The controls can be a little imprecise. You control your arms independently (easily done, no QWOP here), and they target a handhold in reach automatically when you point in the general direction. That works well most of the time, but there are instances where I wanted it to do one thing, it wanted to do another. Not an actual problem though, just an annoyance. Once I got used to this though, I got to the point where the climbing felt fluid and I had several occurrances of "Wow, I wish somebody had seen me pull that off." Always fun, that. EDIT: Forgot to mention how challenging it is. It did not really push me until very near the end. I would not think this to be overly challenging for most people.

There are quite a lot of collectables in this. Easily miss-able, too. That could have really soured me on this, it is one of my pet peeves. Smartly, the game gives you a chapter select after completion with a fine grained list of all the things in the chapter, and which ones you found. So great!

There is a story here, told mainly through letters. I found them to be surprisingly well written and effective. It is rather slight though; you don't come here for the story. There are acoustic vignettes as well, and those I really enjoyed. Putting the sound front and center like this is rarely done and very effective, to me at least.

I loved this game and have very little to complain about, apart from the slightly imprecise nature of the controls. (Again, not a big deal.) If you are up for a quiet, meditative experience and like poking into every corner, this is for you!

Wow, big shift in aesthetics and gameplay from Don’t Nod. They have three games released or slated for release in 2023 and this and Harmony: The Fall of Reverie seem the two most interesting to me. Jusant is quite pretty, and has some decently complex climbing mechanics. I don’t know how many challenging climbing games exist out there, so maybe this is a burgeoning sub-genre. I’d definitely play more.

I did need to load it up in Proton Experimental because the demo wouldn’t seem to launch in the latest stable release. As a result there was a bit of wonkiness but nothing too bad.