Jusant plays wonderfully, and it's coming to Game Pass: be excited
By focusing on the joy of climbing, Don’t Nod has made a special game.
Captain Kirk is climbing the mountain. Why is he climbing the mountain? Because it’s there. Kirk doesn’t need a good reason to climb the mountain: being a man triumphing over nature is its own reward. You don’t need a good reason to watch Star Trek V: The Final Frontier either, because there aren’t any, although a stiff drink is usually recommended.
Jusant is all about triumphing over the environment. There aren’t any enemies to clobber or binary moral decisions to make: your chief interaction with the world is grabbing onto handholds, which you do by coordinating your trigger presses with deft left-stick manipulation that gives you precise individual control over each arm. You can also drive pins into the wall in order to swing, abseil, and wall run. It controls similarly to Ubisoft’s Grow Home, although it’s much more forgiving. A sort of halfway house between that game’s obtuseness and the superhuman one-button climbing of something like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.
It’s a balance that Don’t Nod has absolutely nailed, giving Jusant’s climbing enough trickiness to keep you engaged, but enough leeway that it just feels good in the hands. With practice, it starts to become second nature, at which point the game introduces some more complicated manoeuvres for you to master. This gives you, the player, a sense of personal accomplishment, and not something simulated through gathering EXP and incremental stat gains.
It remains to be seen how this pacing will pan out for the full length of the game when it releases at the end of the month, but there’s also the pull of a great Don’t Nod mystery to keep us going. How did the seas vanish from this ruined world? What is this weird cylindrical mountain? The usual assortment of environmental hints and scraps of discarded letters paint an enticing picture, and given the studio’s penchant for spinning a good yarn, I can’t wait to see how it all comes together.
It’s a game that I think once again demonstrates the usefulness of subscription services as a discovery engine: the fact that this will be hitting Game Pass puts on the radar of a lot of people who might have slept on it otherwise. A game all about climbing stuff and gathering disparate bits of flavour text for no reason other than to satisfy your own curiosity is a pretty hard sell. But the execution here, from what we’ve seen so far, is sublime, and it deserves a quick shot if nothing else.
Check out our forthcoming review in a couple of weeks!
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