HIGH There’s a button just for petting the cute sidekick.

LOW Trying to track down those last few letters.

WTF That last climb is CRAZY.

The tower is tall. Beyond all reason and beyond all belief, it stretches from the floor of a dry ocean up to the edge of space. Its existence makes no sense, but it doesn’t exist in a place of logic. This is a place of fantasy — of what we dream mountain climbing could feel like, if it were stripped of all toil and hardship, and all we were left with was the sheer joy of surmounting the insurmountable.

A third-person climbing sim, Jusant asks players to scale walls. And then some cliffs. And then a stalactite. And then… well, to say any more would be to offer gigantic spoilers. Beyond a door or two and some collectibles to be picked up, Jusant has no interactions for the player other than climbing, and it’s all the better for it, because it allows the player to focus on just how well that climbing works.

Divided into six distinct areas, Jusant takes the player on a journey that begins in the dried-out remains of a fishing-focused civilization and ends higher than any human has ever climbed. Why have the oceans dried up? Why is this climber so dead-set on making it to the top of the tower? The game isn’t particularly concerned with questions like that. Diaries written by long-dead denizens of the tower offer some clues, of course, as do a series of murals that the player can find scattered throughout the levels, but that’s not the focus. No, Jusant is only concerned with the joy of climbing, and it should be judged at how effectively it shares joy that with the player…Which is pretty darn well, actually.

Jusant uses the kind of climbing controls that have become something close to an industry standard, with the the controller’s shoulder buttons representing the grips of the left and right hands. Climbing a wall is as simple as letting go of one button to release a grip, pushing the left controller to stretch an arm in the direction of the next handhold, gripping with the shoulder button, then repeating with the other arm until level ground has been reached. There are complicating factors to keep things interesting, of course. The player has to deal with perilous jumps, manage a stamina meter, and use pitons strategically to establish a safe route across the world’s many sheer cliff faces.

Great lengths have been gone to in order to ensure that the player never feels like they’re just doing the same thing over and over again. Each one of the six stages introduces a new mechanic that adds a wrinkle the climb, from ziplines to blooming flowers to handholds with a mind of their own, there’s always something new to push the player to the limits of their endurance. That said, the game is extremely fair, offering alternate routes through many of its areas. Players frequently have the choice between pushing themselves up a fast but dangerous path, or taking a slower route with more rest areas.

Regardless of a player’s preference, things are about to get even more accessible – while I enjoyed the challenge the controls offered, the developers are patching in a number of accessibility features to ensure that anyone will be able to experience Jusant’s charms. Soon players will be able to turn off the stamina meter and use the thumbstick for all movement, with grabbing happening automatically. It’s not a suite of features I see myself spending much time with personally, but anything that gets more people into this experience is worth doing.

As fantastic as the controls are, they wouldn’t mean a thing if the level design wasn’t spectacular, and the developers haven’t disappointed in that area either. It’s not just that each one of the levels has its own distinct challenges to keep gameplay fresh, it’s the way the look of those levels tells most of the story.

The title itself refers to a tide going out, and the tower’s escalating levels tell the story of a civilization falling apart as the sea, its primary resource, moved further and further away from them. As the player climbs the tower, they’re effectively transported back in time, bearing witness to the remnants of technologically complex society that existed before they had to abandon their homes and move further and further down the tower. Jusant’s story is a somber, affecting one, and it accomplishes that emotional connection almost entirely via the environments the player explores.

Though I’m loathe to bring up a complaint when discussing a game this beautiful, I can’t avoid the fact that the story which I found so enthralling is – at best – incredibly oblique in its presentation. Jusant’s levels are huge, and the player isn’t given much direction in how to explore them. The letters and diary entries that will offer context to the visuals are strewn about haphazardly, with no cues to suggest where the player might search for them. Unless players are willing to absolutely scour each of the levels, they’re guaranteed to miss huge sections of the backstory. I’m confident that the level design is brilliant enough to make the point clear, but if players care about the finer details of this world’s history (or getting trophies for completion) they’ll have to be ready to put in more effort than is reasonable.

Collectibles aside, Jusant is a magical experience from beginning to end. From the very first time I had my avatar grab a handhold and hoist herself up the side of a cliff face I was hooked, and the rest of the adventure never once failed to deliver that same thrill. This is a special experience — one that tosses aside realism and simulation to capture the idea of mountain climbing that exists only in our fantasies. Yes, the story is beautiful, and yes, the level design is impeccable, but what Jusant offers most is the perfected version of climbing beyond what reality can offer, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by DONTNOD. It is currently available on PC, PS5, and XBS/X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated E by the ESRB and has NO content warnings. This is literally the most child-safe game imaginable. There’s no questionable content of any kind. Go nuts.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played the majority of the game without audio and encountered zero difficulties. There is no dialogue to subtitle. Text cannot be resized. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The stone tower is so tall that, standing at the bottom, a human can’t see the top of it.

A figure treks across a boundless desert. At first she seems alone, but we soon discover that she’s carrying a passenger — a glowing blue creature so adorable that its inclusion may qualify as emotional manipulation. No context for this journey is offered, but I can’t imagine needing any. There is a tower, the game offers mechanics that allow me to climb it, and so it will be climbed.

Jusant, a title which refers to a receding tide, is a powerfully spare experience. There are no characters to interact with, no villains to fight. The only antagonist is the tower itself, and it’s a memorable one at that. This spire is an incredible piece of level design, telling its story not just through the occasional diary that the player can find lying around, but via the spaces the player traverses.

Starting out at the lowest levels of the tower, they’ll see hovels hewed roughly into the tower, surrounded by the small boats and fishing nets that let the player know that there was once an ocean here, and at the foot of the tower lived the workers who fed the civilization above. The higher the player climbs, the more intricate and finished the stonework becomes. Simple tool benches where items were cobbled together are replaced with intricate machinery, telling the story of class separation through the items the long-departed denizens employed.

Jusant‘s tower certainly tells a story, but who would ever learn it if the climbing mechanics weren’t magnificent?

Using the standard ‘one trigger for each hand’ system that many climbing games employ, Jusant makes it simple for players to clamber rapidly to impressive heights. A stickler for safety, the climber is careful to hook a safety line into the anchor point that marks the start of each climbing route. Then it’s just a matter of angling the controller towards a likely handhold, releasing one hand from the wall and letting the climber stretch for it. In addition to the anchor point, the player can use pinions to set what are effectively ‘continue points’ along their route in case they want a little insurance before attempting a particularly harrowing jump.

While it’s true Jusant is built around proscribed ‘climbing routes’, rather than letting the player simply clamber up whatever they want in modern Zelda-style, it feel less like a restriction, and more like the developers are curating the most breathtaking experiences.

Leaping from one handhold to another, gripping desperately to a beetle’s shell, using my last bit of stamina to grab hold of a waypoint anchor – I know the developers built the levels around these specific moments, but that doesn’t strip them of their thrill. I was especially impressed by the learning curve.

At the start I was struggling to make even the most basic leaps, and after an hour in I was sprinting in a pendulum arc along a flat wall to build enough momentum to propel myself onto a platform a dozen yards away.

With its enormous, intricate layout, constantly increasing challenge, and stunningly beautiful vistas, Jusant makes a strong case that it might well be the best third-person climbing game ever made. (Need more proof? There’s a button mapped solely for cuddling the cute monster sidekick.)

So long as the rest of the experience lives up to this amazing slice, we’re in for an unbelievable journey this October.

HIGH The first sight of the colony’s oxygen engine.

LOW Trying to figure out how to back eject from an ice climb on a sharp time limit.

WTF The ships still have fuel enough to launch?

The modern media landscape being what it is, I’m never surprised to see a sequel. Often, though, I ask myself whether a particular one is necessary.

Deliver Us the Moon, a perfectly good game about a lonely effort to revive a lunar power station, didn’t seem to be crying out for one, even though the villains’ departure on an obviously-doomed planetary colonization mission was a clear hook. As it happens, the developers took the bait, and the story continues now in Deliver Us Mars.

Much has changed this time around. I felt that Moon suffered from the silence and general disembodiment of its main character, as well as the absence of other individuals to interact with. In  Mars the protagonist is vocal and numerous characters are frequently on screen, albeit somewhat stiff-faced. If anything, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, as Mars has a bit too much chatter and far too many flashbacks.

Unfortunately, the expanded dialogue mainly reveals that many of Deliver Us Mars’ characters are completely insufferable, including those clearly intended to be sympathetic. The protagonist, Kat, is perhaps not the worst, but she’s introduced to us as a child willfully destroying a toy just given to her by her father, and this foolhardy self-centeredness ends up driving much of the plot.

Of course in a game in which the Earth is suffering a climate catastrophe, there’s plenty of willful destruction to go around. Deliver Us Mars is a depressing experience, devoid of optimism for either the potential for colonizing space, or our chances of rescuing the Earth.

As the title suggests, the fleeing scientists of the first game decided to make their new home on Mars, a location not clearly superior to the Moon as a potential home. Their efforts have gone both better and worse than expected. The terms of the story and of Kat’s connection to one of the colonists require that the scientists have, without support from Earth, developed functional industry on an alien planet at a pace that beggars belief, which is just one of the plot’s many striking implausibilities.

A game of this kind tends to fill those holes by dotting its levels with bits of lore, and Kat can find holograms and snippets of text. Yet, it feels like there’s frustratingly little to glean even from surroundings that should be data-rich. This leaves gaps in the story, like how anyone came to think that sending four people to bring back three giant, possibly unfueled spaceships was going to work.

As it happens, the task involves a lot of walking. Much time is spent in plodding traversal, occasionally spiced up by floaty drives in a rover that handles like the second coming of Mass Effect’s Mako. Outdoors, Kat has a time limit on her oxygen, although thankfully the devs eschew Moon’s habit of strewing areas with canisters containing ridiculously tiny quantities of oxygen to extend the timer. The limit rarely matters except when Deliver us Mars asks her to do a bit of rock (or ice) climbing.

The climbing approach is fairly standard. Kat has a pick in each hand controlled by a mouse button or trigger. Holding down that control slams the pick in, releasing it allows her to reposition it. It’s all right as far as it goes, but rock-climbing feels like a mechanic in search of a purpose. The developers gamely keep trying to supply one, but however many platforming challenges Kat encounters, each scenario seems modified to suit the climbing, rather than the climbing being a natural solution to any problems the story poses.

There are also puzzles to solve in the form of routing power beams (generally for opening doors) and positional tasks that are used to unlock holograms. I did not find these to be interesting but at least they, unlike the climbing, felt like they belong.

The sense of story being divorced from events is further accentuated in sequences where Kat is asked to perform tasks related to spacecraft launch. As a highly trained astronaut, Kat should know exactly what to do, but as a player I was forced to scan around until I found an active control panel, figure out how to use it, then carry out a request. None of this was particularly difficult (and at least it fit the context) but it accentuated the divide between the character and me, not least when I was asked to slide forward a throttle and did this while Kat’s immobile hand was visible elsewhere onscreen.

Deliver Us Mars demands a sequel, in the sense that it artlessly uses a couple of post-credits scenes to set one up, but there’s nothing here that left me wanting more. Its puzzles are rather dull and the most notable gameplay activity, rock-climbing, feels like it belongs in an entirely different game. I don’t care for most of the characters that survived Deliver Us Mars’ sloppy, facile plot, and its scenario is hopeless and depressing. A third installment may be inevitable, but I’m not eager for that package to arrive.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by KeokeN Interactive and published by Frontier Foundry.It is currently available on Windows PC, PS4/5, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via the publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 531.29. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Mild Blood and Violence. Per the ESRB: “This is an action-adventure game in which players assume the roles of astronauts investigating a lost colony on Mars. From first- and third-person perspectives, players explore spacecrafts and colonies, solve puzzles, and avoid hazards (e.g., electrical bursts). As players progress, they can unlock journal entries depicting holographic images of violence/peril: colonists suffocating to death; characters sucked into space as a result of a terrorist attack. One sequence depicts an exploding space craft, with a woman left on board. Some scenes depict human corpses scattered across facilities, including a man with blood on his face.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. However, they cannot be altered or resized. During the course of play, there are several noises that are important, for instance a chirp indicating that another quarter of the oxygen tank has been used or an alert from the that a collectible has been identified. Although there are visual counterparts for these noises I noticed that the sounds were more accurate about status and directed me to search areas I had otherwise ignored. I believe the game will be more difficult without the assistance of sound.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers fully remappable controls, but I have seen complaints that this is not true on other platforms. Players on console might want to investgate before a purchase.