Cairn review: "This climber has a grip on me – even when it loses its footing with awkward systems, the challenge remains surmountable"

Twice, Cairn very nearly beat me. Before your final ascent lie two huge skill checks, each asking in a different way if you're really prepared to stick out the rest of the climb up this mountain.

The first is an enormous rock face with no obvious route to the top. The second is a vertical spike jutting up from the rock with some of the most technically-challenging climbing in Cairn's 15-hour runtime. Between them, these two tests were responsible for nearly half of my entire playtime, and each time I scrambled to the top with nothing left in the tank - no food or water, no pitons to protect against a deadly fall, not even any real light by which to find the next hold. Either time, if I'd slipped in those final few meters, I genuinely don't know if I'd have had the perseverance to finish the game.

This is my Everest

After the first of those challenges, in the cutscene that allowed Aava - a professional climber taking on one of the most challenging and dangerous climbs in the world - to rest, recharge, and gather supplies for the next push, she celebrated her temporary success by getting blackout drunk. It's a moment that has gone on to sum up my experience of Cairn. This is a methodical, meditative exploration of the skill and determination that goes into excellence of any kind, undertaken by a character that I constantly struggled to view as the elite athlete she was supposed to be.

When you're first introduced to Aava, she's warming up for her beginner climb. Kami, the deadly mountain she's aiming to summit, is still way off in the distance, and as Aava prepares to take on nothing more dangerous than the walls of a nearby climbing gym, she's stretching through a full split.

Clearly, she's at her physical peak and mentally locked-in, a hyper-capable, nails-hard boss who refuses to be distracted by voicemail pleas from her PR manager. And then you get her six feet off the ground, and it's all too easy for her to become a whimpering mess with no upper body strength who controls like the QWOP runner.

You pilot Aava through each of her limbs, navigating them one at a time to the next hold as she gradually pushes and pulls herself up the mountain. Lock a hand or a foot in place, and the game will select which arm or leg it thinks is most likely to move next. It's generally an elegant solution, far faster than manually selecting each new limb in turn, but that's also an option for navigating particularly tricky sections. Unfortunately, this system can trap itself in a loop, unable to figure out the next hold and simply shuffling each foot back and forth until you take control.

And even when you do take control, there's no guarantee that Aava's fine motor skills are up to the task. Eventually, I uncovered a setting that told me exactly when she'd latched onto a 'good' hold - if Aava's not supported by multiple high-quality handholds for too long, she'll quickly burn through stamina and eventually fall off the wall - but that was only after innumerable attempts where I simply couldn't tell which limb wasn't anchoring her properly. Too many times I'd aim for a specific crevice or outcrop, only for my elite protagonist to slam her paw down too far away for it to count as a safe hold, and go tumbling to her death moments later.

These are the moments where Cairn loses its footing. Under default settings, Aava - already a deeply unsympathetic character for much of her climb - seems to lack the physical strength or mental grit to be the elite athlete we're supposed to see her as. Often quivering with fatigue and fear within moments of leaving camp with her body rested and her belly full, only to pull off a full split at the next crevasse and hold the entire weight of her body and her pack aloft on nothing more than her hip joints, I struggled for hours to believe in Aava as a professional climber.

Ain't no mountain high enough

And yet something drew me ever-upwards. For all the innumerable times I echoed Aava's roar of frustration as she fell from the same hold over and over, I was deeply compelled to reach the top of Kami. I took genuine joy from puzzling out a difficult route, using my resources and skills to execute on it, and then reaching the top unscathed. There were moments of real zen in overcoming those most difficult sections, and those for whom Cairn really clicks will find even more of that feeling in the trickier optional climbs that obscure the deeper secrets of the game's internal mythology.

But I fear most people will find that there are simply too many moments where they can't see past the illusion of Aava. She's not an elite athlete, she's a puppet, and a puppet cannot climb the most dangerous mountain in the world, even with the most skilled master at her strings. Cairn's accommodations give her an edge, but these are advantages the game would rather you not use - unexplained by the tutorial, hidden in settings menus, some actively discouraged by the game.

Beyond its protagonist, there is beauty in Cairn's golden hour-soaked world - in the careful binding of Aava's bruised fingers, in the constant organization and reorganization of her pack, in the planning of a climb based on the weather and the rising and setting of the sun. But that intentionality is too often broken open by a character who constantly struggles to fit within the requirements of the world created for her.

Check out our new games list for what's next on your gaming calendar!