Climbing video games are in vogue. There’s Cairn, if you want something difficult yet meditative. Jusant for a slightly more relaxed take. Peak is there if you want to climb with friends. Tears of the Kingdom, if you want to do a bunch of other stuff that isn’t climbing with your climbing. Baby Steps, if you hate yourself.
I, notorious self-hater, showed up at PAX West for a demo of another climbing game called White Knuckle, in which I discovered entirely new flavors of agony. In White Knuckle, you are a pair of hands, and you must use them to climb. Some horrible toxic sludge is slowly yet constantly rising beneath you, and you must remain above it, or die and start all the way over with a new map, Rogue-like.
You climb one hand at a time, gripping ledges and edges and handholds until your white knuckles turn pink and then red with the strain, at which point you must rest your hand or, exhausted, take a tumble. But with those strong hands you can swing, or laboriously pull yourself up bit by bit. You can jump, and grab a far-off ledge. You have a hammer in your pack: if you find some picks you can whack them into walls and make new handholds for yourself, or if you find a metal rod you can chuck it, hard, at a distant wall to give yourself something to swing or stand on. But that will in turn mean you don’t have a pick or a rod to use later on. And grabbing such things takes up space in your bag, and each time you need something you have to open your bag and fumble around inside to find it, and all the while your hands are weakening, weakening, weakening…!
White Knuckle is not a slow climb, despite the significant strategy and care required for every last inch of height you want to gain. It is billed as a speed-climbing game, which you wouldn’t have known from watching my half hour of attempts. I think, with time and practice, I could get better. Learn how to use the tools, how to hang with one hand while driving a pick into a wall with the other. When to shove a can of nasty slop into my face to regain some stamina mid-climb. I love the griminess of White Knuckle, the very physical feeling of your hands trembling and growing redder, redder with the strain, the scramble to open your pack and shuffle around its contents, which must be physically placed somewhere within its bounds and remembered and retrieved as needed. I like, too, the fear of making a wrong decision: even early on, White Knuckle presents players with multiple paths upward. But some of those paths suck, and you don’t always know at a glance which ones are going to be absurdly hard, or require tools you don’t have or have already used. Screw up once, and you might have to drop back down, throwing out precious seconds, just to try again.
I am told that the higher I get, the scarier this weird, sci-fi/nuclear/factory/lab/whatever structure becomes. There are creatures, I’m told. Things that will rise from the dark and try to stop my climb. At this time, I am not even fast enough to escape the rising sludge. How will I also evade…Things? Presumably with power-ups of some kind, which I am told are also hidden up high and which will persist from run to run. So far, all I’ve seen are cockroaches, of the brown and gold varieties, which I can collect for some reason. But with no context as to where I am or why I’m in this pit, I have no doubt that horrible things will absolutely ruin my ascent again and again, power-ups or no.
White Knuckle is enjoyably tense in the way it ignites a battle within myself against the profound urge to panic and just start flailing upward. It’s in the name, bay-bee! I talk a lot on here about how I’m actually quite bad at high-skill games like this one, but love love love the rush of slowly but surely improving, overcoming obstacles, and eventually seeing God when a run goes juuuuuust right. White Knuckle, at least in the little I saw, is promising some of that energy. I don’t normally do well with time limits. I prefer a slow and methodical type of self-hating climb. But I’ll give White Knuckle another shot now that I’m home, if only to see if there’s any shot in hell of me evading whatever Beings happen to be living down here with me.
White Knuckle is currently in early access on Steam, and there’s also a free demo if you just want to see if you’ve got a climber’s spirit somewhere deep, deep inside you.
