Jusant (Xbox Series X)

Mountain climbing and relaxation don’t feel like they would go hand in hand, but Jusant’s goal seems to be to make its climbing more calming than pulse-pounding. There are dangers during your climb but none that really leave a mark, the intent seeming to be a peaceful game where you scale cliff faces as you make your way higher and higher up the rocky Tower that serves as your peak to conquer.

Jusant is a French word tied to the receding tide, and in the world of this game, it seems the receding tide never returned. The oceans have disappeared, leading to the land around the Tower being a vast desert filled with the wrecks of ships that no longer had a sea to sail.  Civilization fought to survive despite this though, clinging to what water still remained as over time people began to forget about the world before the Jusant and even forgot if rain ever truly existed. However, they do make interesting use of the world they inherited, for as you climb the Tower, you can find its surface covered with not just the wrecks of an old world, but people who have turned them into their new homes. An entire society was built on the towering pillar of rock you’re scaling as you follow the legend of a place above the clouds where water can be found, and finding the places the people inhabited and the notes they left behind might just be the most interesting part of the adventure. The main character is never identified but does travel with a tiny and adorable blue companion called a Ballast, but the real story of scaling the Tower seems to come from the logs of Bianca, a girl who sought answers in the clouds before you. As you scale the lonely tower, no sign of other humans still inhabiting it, you’ll occasionally find Bianca’s notebooks left to hearten any future climbers like yourself, and her tale does seem to give the climb more emotional beats and reflections on purpose. It’s a nice way to add meaning to an adventure that feels lacking in much of a story otherwise, but the journals and other interesting logs are missable and sometimes squirreled away off the beaten path, meaning even if you get invested in them you can unfortunately end up with an incomplete tale.

Jusant’s climbing seems to be the game’s bigger focus over story, and it is pretty easy to understand. The left stick and left trigger control the left hand, and in turn the right stick and right trigger guide your right as you climb. You use a stick to reach out to handhold, press the trigger down, and your climber will clasp onto it for as long as you hold that trigger down. You do have a stamina meter, it reducing in size the longer a climb lasts without finding solid ground, but the meter energy can actually be refreshed rather easily just by pressing in the right control stick on occasion, so most of the time the stamina meter just feels like a way of preventing you from taking things too slowly rather than being an active pressure. Handholds, whether they be ledges or rocks, whether you’re climbing vertically or hanging from indentations in a ceiling, are rarely hard to grab, your character not having to stretch too far and many periods of climbing can be done with little thought as you get into the rhythm of one hand moving up immediately after the other. Things can sometimes look precarious, especially if you angle the camera right, but you don’t often feel in peril after you come to realize how solid a grip the climber has and how little it asks you to put yourself at risk. There are times you may need to jump to the next thing to grip, the controls for it a little testy since you need to pull yourself backwards before launching upward, but even then the brief danger of jumps are offset by the ease of establishing anchor points.

Whenever it’s time to climb, your character puts down an anchor point at the start, so no matter what, if you fall, you’ll always have a rope supporting you so it’s impossible to fall off the mountain or to your doom. Usually, after finding some flat ground to stand on, you reel in the rope and then need to find somewhere else to climb, but when scaling longer stretches, you may need to find new spots that your initial anchor can hook into, because if your rope gets too long, you won’t be able to move in new directions. However, you are also able to put up to three additional support pitons, these working as temporary anchor points that don’t fix the rope problem but mean if you fall you’ll end up hanging from the new spot. Most of the time, if there is a jump you’re nervous about or something at play like strong winds that could mess you up, you often can put down a piton without concern, meaning the moment doesn’t seem so dangerous anymore since there’s no real risk of even losing progress.

The climbing, on its own, ends up feeling a bit forgiving and easy, but over time, the game does start introducing more elements to the process. Sometimes you’ll need to use your rope to swing to new handholds, and even though your anchor keeps you safe, it still feels more perilous than climbing because there’s a real chance of missing and dropping low enough you’ll need to pull yourself back up the rope to try again. That Ballast you brought along isn’t just a cute face, it can release a pulse of energy that can cause nearby plants to grow rapidly, meaning they can serve as climbing assists. Some areas you may have to contend with something like high winds making jumps risky or the heat of the sun draining stamina quickly, but these elements mostly help the game avoid becoming stale rather than serving as some new challenge to overcome. They make you climb a bit differently, and that ends up true of the Tower itself. Sometimes you’re scaling the sides of homes and buildings rather than rocky cliffsides, others you might end up inside the rocky spire in cramped spaces or yawning caverns. Each chapter of the game makes sure to introduce at least one new thing, and some like the rock bugs that you sometimes need to hitch a ride on recur so not every good idea is a limited time gimmick, the variety at least holding your interest for its range rather than how much it impacts the climbing that still feels rather similar despite it all.

One unfortunate side effect of Jusant wanting to focus on accommodating mountain climbing emerges when you wish to scour areas for those hidden notes, letters, and other collectibles like seashells and cairns. Jusant will place invisible walls near edges to avoid you stumbling off by mistake, and at first, it seems like these also exist to keep you from exploring areas just meant for show. There are parts of the Tower you aren’t meant to climb on but look like they could hide secrets, so keeping you from accessing them prevents you from wasting time. However, there are times where spaces off to the side do contain collectibles, and the game will still try to keep you from accessing them. Whenever you’re walking on foot things are already a bit rough, it easy to get stuck on random objects and the game invites you to explore but has spots you can get briefly trapped if you walk too far into a corner or near piles of rubble. When you can see something you want to grab, the game might outright prevent you from going to it with annoying barriers, the exploration feeling discouraged. In fact, sometimes you’ll scale up something, realize you missed an alternate path, and find the way back blocked by a new invisible wall. Thankfully, you can sometimes trick the game, leaping towards a nearby wall and trying to place your own piton repeatedly until it finally works, after which you can lower yourself down to these areas it was pointlessly barring you from. Usually the game is pretty good about giving you more reasonable paths to optional activities and items, but it does mess it up often enough that your natural curiosity is sometimes curtailed by these attempts at restricting the player from falling in a game where falling feels like it should have been a reasonable concern to accommodate.

THE VERDICT: The meditative climbing of Jusant does undergo changes as you climb higher and higher, but the small changes to the formula seem to exist more to stave off stagnation than truly stimulate the player. The climbing feels natural and it not being too demanding allows you to instead drink in the world of Jusant, appreciating the notes you find and basking in the visual design of the areas you climb through. At times though the game erects invisible barriers that limit how you can enjoy it, navigation outside of prescribed climbing areas awkward even when secrets are nearby. Serene rather than thrilling, Jusant keeps you interested in the climb even though it’s never as difficult as it might look.

And so, I give Jusant for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. Bianca’s journals really feel like they should have been the game’s main focus. It is compelling to read as her opinions change as she climbs and read some philosophy about the lives of those people who live in this dry and derelict world, but Jusant’s accessible and clean climbing really feels like the framework you would hang a compelling story on and Bianca’s journals can muster up some vivid imagery despite not being too long to read. Being able to miss them and being detached as an outside reader means they aren’t as impactful as they would have been had we followed her climb, and our hero has barely any story attached to them so their climb feels too straightforward to get deeply invested in. If the climbing is going to be easy and relaxed, Jusant needed something else to invigorate the player’s interest. At least the new mechanics that come and go shake things up relatively often, but it can also struggle to leave an impression because of its subdued presentation and its reticence to tap into mountain climbing’s inherent tension. If one thing should definitely be changed, it is the overzealous invisible wall placement. If ledges truly are so scary when it comes to disrupting the flow, have the player briefly teeter or stop for a bit so the player can decide if they wish to plummet, the secrets easier to pursue without artificial blockages getting in the way of some of the game’s best moments of exploration and discovery.

You won’t regret climbing the Tower in Jusant, but you also won’t really walk away changed since it’s hardly a gripping climb. A nice setting is established, you don’t linger long anywhere so you keep finding new things, but putting one hand in front of the other needs something extra to go from simple satisfaction to a compelling journey. Maybe that would have come from gimmicks with teeth, from following Bianca, or just making the climbing difficult would make this a better experience, but there is room in the world for the simply joy of a calm climb that is more about being the surmountable mountain to scale than replicating how difficult such a thing would truly be.