What is difficulty anymore. (Affectionate, ponderous.)
Games like Jusant and Cocoon feel like they are important links in the evolution of the medium. There is a rejection of modern game mechanics that grasps at something truer, purer than many games allow themselves to be. However, there are still enough vestiges to place where Jusant exists in the evolutionary timeline.
Jusant is simple. There are no unlockable abilities. There are no upgrades. You have one length of rope, three placeable climbing anchors, and a set amount of stamina throughout the entire game. As you cannot jump off ledges you cannot climb up to, you cannot die. The environment changes, but your basic gameplay mechanics are the same:
- Climb hand over hand between hand-holds
- Jump from a hand-hold to something else grabbable
- Place anchors
- Repel from or towards your last placed anchor
- Swing from an anchor to reach a space horizontally
Miss a hand-hold, and you fall to your last self-selected checkpoint, or otherwise attempt the climb again. Your stamina runs out the faster you climb and the more you jump; standing on solid ground resets it again. (Though honestly I don't remember what the penalty for running out of stamina is because I don't think it ever happened in my playthrough.)
It all sounds so simple and elegant, and the initial experience with the game is fastidious enough to feel unique. Each hand is controlled by the corresponding shoulder button. While one hand is gripping a ledge, the control stick moves the other hand in search of purchase. It’s a clunky introduction that gives the impression this will be a game that needs precision and careful thought.
But here is where my thoughts about difficulty come in. Once I got into the rhythm of alternating presses of the shoulder buttons, the uniqueness of selecting my next hand-hold felt trivial. The player character’s hands are so magnetic that their placement hardly ever mattered. Especially as the game tried introducing more environmental mechanics. When climbing a simple rock face filled with purchases, this mechanic had some weight to it. But when the game needed to convey more environmental / visual information, and thus constrict my hand-holds in linearity to accommodate, there no longer was any pretense of expression.
Ultimately, the slightly unorthodox controls are, in execution, more texture than anything else. There is no depth to this arrangement - for all that hand placement mattered, I might as well have been pressing one button instead of two. I am not sure this is a complaint. But it dovetails into my general thoughts about this game and difficulty.
Jusant is a game of very mild tension. I know that the lives system in games is archaic - conceptually, most games do not have a penalty for poor performance more creative than wasting some of the player’s time. The only question was whether that was watching a life counter tick down, or possibly starting over from an earlier level, or even the title screen. In a well designed game, making the player repeat content is not necessarily a bad thing, if the content being replayed reinforces skill proficiency that will be necessary at the previous point of failure. But many indie games, and even some modern big budget titles, have recognized that if you are not doing that, you are just wasting the players time.
So Jusant does not have a health system or a life system. Falling from any attempted climb has the very basic cause and effect of having to start over again from the bottom. And, I respect this. I really do. Jusant is not a game that needs those systems to be interesting - they add nothing to the other climbing systems that are in place. However, I had the experience of seeing success as an inevitability more than an aspiration - I just needed to persist.
I mentioned the controls first because my failures were rarely from a situation where I thought the game was demanding too much from me. Really, more often than not I just didn’t have the camera facing the right way to see the next objective and was sending myself on a mini fool’s errand. Moment to moment, technical execution did not feel like a threat. Minute to minute, failure did not feel like a threat. So level to level, the feeling of any kind of threat, and thus any kind of achievement from success, felt less and less like anything.
I think now of my experience with Celeste. Both are games “about climbing”, and both put you right back at the start should you fail a climb. However, Celeste frames each failure as death. You explode, the screen shakes. Celeste demanded more from me in technical execution, so much more so that there was incredible tension in repeated attempts, even if the game was overall kinder to my persistence than Jusant. In Jusant, you just fall. Celeste feels more visceral, but in reality, it lets me try again faster than Jusant, where my dude has to fall, pick himself back up, and walk back over to where he can try again. Not only that, the game was unprepared for the colossally stupid ways I found to fail. Multiple times in Jusant did I fail a jump, get my rope wound over some coral, and struggle to figure out how to repel myself back to the starting line. I wanted the option to cut my rope and “die” so badly, instead of figuring out what combination of anchoring, swinging and repelling would give me enough rope length back to start over.
At the same time, those challenges of happenstance were some of the most interesting puzzles I had to solve in the whole game.
I don’t think Jusant needs to be a difficult game. I don’t know how much it would have been improved by going full Death Stranding or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Maybe it would have been great, maybe it would have lost all interest because people only wanted a game with climbing aesthetic and mechanical “vibes” more than anything with technical challenges. Because I was not solving great puzzles in Jusant. It was not a challenge of physical execution.
At its core, I think Jusant is just a cozy vibes game. A game that invites imagining that it is doing things more interesting than it provides.
3 stars, B rank. I did not read a single word of the collectibles because my god why the hell does this game have trinket-itis for when you’re walking around and not climbing??? Like, I would have liked this game and most games a lot better if it had zero trinkets, but if it needed to have trinkets, why aren’t they obtained by engaging with the central game mechanics? Maybe it's unfair damnation by association, but the proximity made me feel as if the developers saw all of their somewhat interesting transversal mechanics as steps along an amusement park ride rather than worthy of being thought about in terms of joy of movement.
A solid first effort, would be highly interested in what direction a sequel or knock-off would attempt.
Games like Jusant and Cocoon feel like they are important links in the evolution of the medium. There is a rejection of modern game mechanics that grasps at something truer, purer than many games allow themselves to be. However, there are still enough vestiges to place where Jusant exists in the evolutionary timeline.
Jusant is simple. There are no unlockable abilities. There are no upgrades. You have one length of rope, three placeable climbing anchors, and a set amount of stamina throughout the entire game. As you cannot jump off ledges you cannot climb up to, you cannot die. The environment changes, but your basic gameplay mechanics are the same:
- Climb hand over hand between hand-holds
- Jump from a hand-hold to something else grabbable
- Place anchors
- Repel from or towards your last placed anchor
- Swing from an anchor to reach a space horizontally
Miss a hand-hold, and you fall to your last self-selected checkpoint, or otherwise attempt the climb again. Your stamina runs out the faster you climb and the more you jump; standing on solid ground resets it again. (Though honestly I don't remember what the penalty for running out of stamina is because I don't think it ever happened in my playthrough.)
It all sounds so simple and elegant, and the initial experience with the game is fastidious enough to feel unique. Each hand is controlled by the corresponding shoulder button. While one hand is gripping a ledge, the control stick moves the other hand in search of purchase. It’s a clunky introduction that gives the impression this will be a game that needs precision and careful thought.
But here is where my thoughts about difficulty come in. Once I got into the rhythm of alternating presses of the shoulder buttons, the uniqueness of selecting my next hand-hold felt trivial. The player character’s hands are so magnetic that their placement hardly ever mattered. Especially as the game tried introducing more environmental mechanics. When climbing a simple rock face filled with purchases, this mechanic had some weight to it. But when the game needed to convey more environmental / visual information, and thus constrict my hand-holds in linearity to accommodate, there no longer was any pretense of expression.
Ultimately, the slightly unorthodox controls are, in execution, more texture than anything else. There is no depth to this arrangement - for all that hand placement mattered, I might as well have been pressing one button instead of two. I am not sure this is a complaint. But it dovetails into my general thoughts about this game and difficulty.
Jusant is a game of very mild tension. I know that the lives system in games is archaic - conceptually, most games do not have a penalty for poor performance more creative than wasting some of the player’s time. The only question was whether that was watching a life counter tick down, or possibly starting over from an earlier level, or even the title screen. In a well designed game, making the player repeat content is not necessarily a bad thing, if the content being replayed reinforces skill proficiency that will be necessary at the previous point of failure. But many indie games, and even some modern big budget titles, have recognized that if you are not doing that, you are just wasting the players time.
So Jusant does not have a health system or a life system. Falling from any attempted climb has the very basic cause and effect of having to start over again from the bottom. And, I respect this. I really do. Jusant is not a game that needs those systems to be interesting - they add nothing to the other climbing systems that are in place. However, I had the experience of seeing success as an inevitability more than an aspiration - I just needed to persist.
I mentioned the controls first because my failures were rarely from a situation where I thought the game was demanding too much from me. Really, more often than not I just didn’t have the camera facing the right way to see the next objective and was sending myself on a mini fool’s errand. Moment to moment, technical execution did not feel like a threat. Minute to minute, failure did not feel like a threat. So level to level, the feeling of any kind of threat, and thus any kind of achievement from success, felt less and less like anything.
I think now of my experience with Celeste. Both are games “about climbing”, and both put you right back at the start should you fail a climb. However, Celeste frames each failure as death. You explode, the screen shakes. Celeste demanded more from me in technical execution, so much more so that there was incredible tension in repeated attempts, even if the game was overall kinder to my persistence than Jusant. In Jusant, you just fall. Celeste feels more visceral, but in reality, it lets me try again faster than Jusant, where my dude has to fall, pick himself back up, and walk back over to where he can try again. Not only that, the game was unprepared for the colossally stupid ways I found to fail. Multiple times in Jusant did I fail a jump, get my rope wound over some coral, and struggle to figure out how to repel myself back to the starting line. I wanted the option to cut my rope and “die” so badly, instead of figuring out what combination of anchoring, swinging and repelling would give me enough rope length back to start over.
At the same time, those challenges of happenstance were some of the most interesting puzzles I had to solve in the whole game.
I don’t think Jusant needs to be a difficult game. I don’t know how much it would have been improved by going full Death Stranding or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Maybe it would have been great, maybe it would have lost all interest because people only wanted a game with climbing aesthetic and mechanical “vibes” more than anything with technical challenges. Because I was not solving great puzzles in Jusant. It was not a challenge of physical execution.
At its core, I think Jusant is just a cozy vibes game. A game that invites imagining that it is doing things more interesting than it provides.
3 stars, B rank. I did not read a single word of the collectibles because my god why the hell does this game have trinket-itis for when you’re walking around and not climbing??? Like, I would have liked this game and most games a lot better if it had zero trinkets, but if it needed to have trinkets, why aren’t they obtained by engaging with the central game mechanics? Maybe it's unfair damnation by association, but the proximity made me feel as if the developers saw all of their somewhat interesting transversal mechanics as steps along an amusement park ride rather than worthy of being thought about in terms of joy of movement.
A solid first effort, would be highly interested in what direction a sequel or knock-off would attempt.