How many chances should you give a game before you decide it’s just not clicking with you? That’s what I asked myself every time I booted up the Game Bakers’ Cairn. As a huge fan of the studio’s past work with its romance RPG Haven, I was eager to put on some climbing gear and see what the team had waiting for me at the top of its rocky mountain. But each time I turned the game back on, I felt like I was struggling to get a foothold in its dense, cumbersome climbing.
A lot of games make you climb, but few have ever required me to be as intentional with every single movement as I scaled their cliffs. In most games that have you climbing and doing cool parkour tricks, simply pushing your analog stick in the right direction will have your hero pretty autonomously accounting for every gap between handholds, with the developer having painstakingly crafted a path for you to cross that miraculously accounts for where the character’s feet are going to go as you reach for your next conveniently placed grip. Cairn, meanwhile, makes you move all four of heroine Aava’s extremities independently, which is what makes the game challenging, and often maddening.
I spent my time with Cairn methodically charting a course up the side of a cliff, hoping that by the time I reached the halfway point I’d have somewhere for both feet and both hands to rest, lest I find myself tumbling down a chasm after my limbs grew weak from all the exertion. Much like in real rock climbing, your climbing in Cairn rapidly oscillates between stretches of breezy momentum as you effortlessly climb and find places where your hands and feet can comfortably sit, and very sudden roadblocks. Encountering these, you only have so much time to figure out how to proceed before Aava’s shaky legs give out from under you.
Cairn’s control scheme can be awkward to navigate, with you having to swap between the various limbs you’re controlling at any given moment, and your view of them often obscured by Aava’s torso in the game’s behind-her-back camera angle. Even when it highlights her limbs as you pivot between them, their positioning can get so wacky as you’re climbing that it can be difficult to tell whether you’re controlling her right arm or her left leg. Aava’s body contorts to ascend the side of these mountains, and when precise movement is so core to your progress in this game, even the slightest moment of obscurity can turn a mostly frictionless scale into a quick fall back to the start of a climb.
Movement is clunky in Cairn, and movement is what you do in this game. Even when Aava is standing on solid ground, the weight of her climbing gear makes her sluggish to pilot, so simply stepping along a flat surface requires the same kind of measured attention as deciding which chip in the stone to reach for next. You’re not really meant to run up to the side of a cliff and just start crawling up the side of it. Every path you endeavour to climb must be meticulously planned, often from below, and I can imagine how that kind of slow, thoughtful movement could click for someone more patient than I, but Cairn’s dedication to emulating the full-body workout of rock climbing can’t get out of its own way.
I sometimes think about how video game control schemes can never truly capture realistic movement on an intuitive, sensory level. As much as we become accustomed to the clicking of buttons, the clanking of sticks, and the swerving of a gaming mouse, they are still approximations of real-world movement, an imperfect translation of how our bodies navigate physical space and experience sensory input. VR allows for the closest approximation, and even it can’t replicate the feeling of a gun’s kickback or punching a bad guy in the jaw. Cairn is going the extra mile to try and recreate the feeling of having to independently account for your entire body at any given moment, in a way that we often take for granted when we’re just walking through life. Climbing requires you to be aware of everything from your toes to fingertips. The game’s attempt to replicate that is an admirable one, but the gap it tries to bridge between how the human body moves and how a video game character does feels like it doesn’t quite meet in the middle. What’s left is something that rewards a level of patience I don’t think I have anymore. I’ll just keep my feet firmly planted on the ground for now.