I Recommend: Jusant

27th May 2024

Jusant is a third-person climbing game from Don’t Nod, very much in the style of Uncharted and recent Tomb Raiders but minus the combat and cinematic storytelling. In true indie fashion, you play an anonymous young boy with unknown intentions and a cute little toad-like companion in his rucksack. We meet the boy as he hikes through a barren seabed towards an immense, coral-encrusted rock tower that penetrates the sky. As he reaches the foot of the tower, the boy looks up determinedly, and the game begins.  

I say “climbing” rather than “platforming game” because, as Jusant’s opening suggests, the emphasis here is very much on scaling up, not jumping or vaulting or wall-running across, despite rope-swinging being a critical verb in your move set. Fortunately, climbing in Jusant is intuitive and tactile. Facing a wall, you begin by squeezing the left or right trigger to grip the nearest handhold with the corresponding hand. You ascend by pushing the stick in the direction of the next handhold and then squeezing the free trigger, meaning the tempo with which you climb is dictated by your actual hand coordination.   

There’s something in the way the boy reaches out for and grabs distant handholds that reminds me of Uncharted 4, specifically. In that game, climbing has a surprisingly sensuous quality: the longer you depress the stick, the farther Nathan Drake extends his body, stretching first through his legs and torso, then along his arm and hand, all the way to the tips of his fingers. While Jusant’s animations can’t quite sell the same suppleness of movement—understandably, given the disparities in budget and manpower—its use of the triggers to simulate your actual grip on the rockface creates a subtle verisimilitude that's simply absent from Naughty Dog’s blockbuster. More than once, the boy’s hands came to a sudden stop as my own failed to interpret conflicting impulses from my brain, and it took a second or two of psychic disentangling to decide which hand was going to take the lead, lest I release both simultaneously.  

In this regard, what Jusant really reminds me of is the original Tomb Raider games, in which you had to hold Ctrl to keep Lara clinging to a ledge for dear life. And indeed, this decision to harken back thirty years feels like a quiet repudiation of Jusant’s contemporaries: while other games rely on integrated combat mechanics and bombastic set-pieces to enliven the climbing experience, Jusant’s novel control scheme captures the essential thrill of climbing in and of itself.  

It’s a shame, then, that Jusant steadfastly refuses to place you—or let you place yourself—in mortal danger. About an hour into the game, I ran around a corner that was much closer to the cliffside than I realised and braced for impact with the earth below—only, instead of plummeting to my death, I simply ran on the spot, held in place by an invisible wall lining the cliff’s edge. As it turns out, these walls bulwark every ledge in the game over five or six feet high. The only way to run or jump through them is to attach yourself to a wall with a rope and piton first.  

At the time, this very much felt like Jusant’s death knell. Inherent in the promise of climbing a great big rock tower is the threat of falling off it, after all. But as I kept playing, the experience never felt compromised in the way I’d expected. I think that’s due in part to the fact that Jusant rarely puts you in a situation where deadly slip-ups are likely. You have all the time in the world to navigate most jumps and ledges, and on the few occasions where timing is necessary, the game is perfectly generous. More than that, however, it’s the aesthetic: Jusant’s Pixar-adjacent art simply precludes the idea of watching a twelve-year-old boy repeatedly fall to his death. Consequently, when I later experienced total synaptic failure and released both hands from the tower at once, only to watch the boy decelerate through the air before landing unharmed on solid rock thirty feet below, I still felt disappointed (not to mention bemused), but my overall experience remained surprisingly intact.   

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Hands aside, your only tools in Jusant are the aforementioned climbing rope and pitons and your little rucksack companion, who can emit a magical pulse to manipulate the local flora and fauna: vines and bulbs can be flowered in an instant to produce new handholds, clouds of fireflies summoned to lift you through extended wall jumps, and scuttling molluscs frozen in place to create new paths. Unfortunately, while these magical flourishes add a bit of flair to the climbing experience, they struggle to layer in the additional depth you might expect when you first encounter them.  

The vines and bulbs, for instance, grow along predetermined routes that usually comprise the game’s critical path, making the button press required to activate them a simple formality. A modicum of strategy and coordination is required in sunnier sections, where direct sunlight causes certain flowers to wilt within seconds of blooming, but the idea never evolves beyond that. Similarly, the fireflies that lift you from one handhold to the next feel largely redundant: the boy can already double-jump against walls to reach distant handholds, and the distances covered by the fireflies never seemed significantly greater.  

Thankfully, the rope and pitons are far more robust. Whenever you start climbing, a piton is automatically placed in the wall to anchor you via the rope. Three additional pitons can be placed as you see fit, to create either checkpoints in case you fall or anchors from which you can wall-run or swing freely to reach distant ledges and handholds. You can also place the first piton yourself if you need to abseil instead of climb. Consequently, while most problems in Jusant only really have one solution, the variety of actions available and the freedom to use them at-will ensures that a wholly linear experience rarely chafes. A wider, more freeform play-space in which to invent your own solutions certainly wouldn’t hurt, but the core idea feels satisfyingly realised.  

Indeed, my only real complaint with the rope-swinging, minor physics quibbles aside (you feel unnaturally floaty at low velocities, although the sense of weight improves dramatically with increased momentum), is the control scheme. Instead of, say, squeezing the triggers to grip the rope before you can start swinging, or alternating between them to climb up or down it, you simply push the analogue stick in the direction you want to go while hanging and hold the left or right bumper to ascend or descend automatically. Given the tactile pleasures of Jusant's rock-climbing, it’s disappointing that the control scheme responsible was abandoned in favour of something more conventional, even if the rope is still plenty fun to use.  

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Narratively, Jusant is wisely restrained, allowing its climbing to take centre-stage. The boy arrives at the foot of the tower, activates some ancient machinery on his way up, and at the very top, we come to understand what his goal has been, all without a word of dialogue and contained within a handful of short cutscenes. While there is lore to consume in the form of letters and diary entries left by the tower’s departed residents, I quickly gave up on reading them: they’re overfamiliar to anyone accustomed to this kind of storytelling, and many were confoundingly long, to the extent that the absent dialogue and voice acting started to feel less like the aesthetic choice I’d happily accepted it as and more like a budgetary constraint the game was now trying to compensate for.  

And really, these texts are just unnecessary. The abandoned homes, classrooms, and workshops that pockmark the tower are stirring enough, and then there are the conch shells to be found in each area. In a touching inversion, these shells echo not the ocean, which seems to have evaporated from Jusant’s world, but the sounds of everyday human life, and they are a far more elegant display of a community displaced by ecological disaster than reams upon reams of writing. Indeed, I’d be remiss if I didn’t praise Jusant’s sound design in general: the thoc-thoc-thoc of the boy’s steel-soled shoes on stone; the gentle breeze licking over baking rock; molluscs scuttling on needlepoint—Jusant is a beautiful game, but it's this soundscape that not only brings it to life but makes the absence thereof so keenly felt. 

Ultimately, though, it’s not sight or sound but touch that sets Jusant apart. Thanks to the novel control scheme at its core and the sense of agency it wrings out of its limited toolset, climbing in this game is a tactile pleasure. Yes, I wish there was more freedom in how you climb and that the control scheme was more consistently applied—and I really wish the game had an actual solution for what happens when you slip off a ledge or fall thirty feet to the ground. But, in the end, clinging to the tower, these quibbles quietly recede behind the sun on my back, the wind in my hair, and the solid hunk of rock felt firmly in my hand.