Today’s game comes from a genre where you can find the most interesting topics – indie games. And today’s topic is one that plays a minor role in many other games: “Jusant” is mainly about climbing. Further and further up the same mountain, but much more relaxed than in “Celeste” for example – does such a concept work?

Let’s first clarify the basics, especially the title: “Jusant” is the French word for low tide, and in principle that’s exactly what it’s about. We are a young woman who is part of a people who live on the steep slopes of a mountain. The residents are very dependent on water, be it for drinking, powering machines or for sea travel. But one day the “Justant”, the low tide, comes and the water never returns. Little by little, all the residents are leaving the mountain and setting out to find a better place to live. However, not all of them: some set out to solve the mystery of the missing water.

So now we set off and want to find out what happened. With us is our strange little friend – a weird but cute creature which kinda looks like a ghost. It helps us to activate certain mechanisms in some places. Why he can do this will be clarified later – I’ll leave it at this for now. But he is very cute to look at and very cuddly!

This basically explains the whole story. The rest of the story takes place primarily through various notes, newspapers and letters that we find during our ascent. In it we learn about different motivations and different beliefs of the former residents who have to deal with the new situation – but for spoiler reasons I won’t go into it in more detail. But it is definitely versatile and very interesting to read, which motivates you to actually find all the documents. In the end I was only missing one note, which meant I learned practically everything about the story – but I was no longer motivated enough to find the last piece of the puzzle. That wasn’t a bad thing, even with little information you get a good idea of what happened.

Overall, the story is told calmly and in detail, but at no point did I get bored. It was very interesting and the surrounding area was always inviting to explore – you could find lots of cute and interesting things. The low-poly graphics and the simple controls made it a very nice and relaxing game, the climbing parts were rarely really exciting. But that fit very well into the overall context and resulted in a nice flow of the game.

Oh yes, the climbing – I almost forgot the main aspect because of my enthusiasm. You can definitely say that the journey is a big part of the destination here. It’s never undemanding, but never too exciting either; There are smaller puzzles, or rather confusing paths, whose destination you have to figure out, but these are never frustrating or illogical. After a short analysis, you can often recognize the path and you quickly rejoice at the success of having completed another stage – be it through the correct order of the individual parts or by reaching a stopover before your stamina runs out.

Decreasing stamina is of course a classic element of climbing in video games, and definitely a challenge at one point or another. Through consistent securing, be it automatically or manually using hooks we can set, there are no moments of stress – if you fall, it’s only a short distance to the next hook. There is no reset to a checkpoint, which would mean you have to repeat larger stages. This contributes a lot to the relaxation factor.

The controls were always very precise, which meant there was no frustration. Overall, if something went wrong, you always knew what the problem was and could try something new straight away – this meant you didn’t have to work twice unnecessarily and you didn’t have the feeling that the game was trying to waste time – other games sometimes make excessive use of this which is something that annoys me quite easily.

The playing time is well chosen at just under 5 hours. Much less would compress the story and the tranquility of the game too much, much more would max out the fun of the element of climbing. Even if new elements and functions are added over time that enrich the gaming experience, there are limits – these were not unnecessarily exceeded here in order to extend the playing time. I like that very much.

So, what are my final conclusions? As has been mentioned often in this article, the game has a lot of things done right – frankly, I can’t think of anything that it does badly. I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, it really only fills a small niche. However, it does this very well – so well, in fact, that a beautiful game has been built from the side functions of other games in conjunction with a beautiful, emotional and interesting story. I definitely recommend it!

What do you think? Did you like to watch or was it too slow-paced for you? Have you played it or plan to do so? Join the discussion on Discord!