Boulderin’! What’s your price for flight?

D: One of the benefits of our shifted schedule, beyond being able to balance work and life again, is getting to focus on something we’ve loved but deemphasized in our weekly coverage: multiplayer. Many group games require scheduling across several sessions, a longer commitment to delving deep into their mechanics, or to use a better metaphor for our subject, reaching new heights. I’m excited to talk about the game that’s gripped our friend group like Tarzan on a vine.

D: PEAK is the result of a 4 week-long game jam between members of Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, and is ironclad proof that limitation breeds creativity, because the result is the best take on the ever-growing “prox chat clip generator” genre yet. The mechanics here strike a balance between wacky physics clownery and legitimately excellent traversal options. Scaling a wall is as easy as holding a button while pressing a direction, but the challenge is in identifying your destination and navigating efficiently while managing your ever-dwindling stamina meter. One of our players is a bouldering aficionado, and commented that the game captures the exact feel of the activity to a T. With all the focus on first person limb-positioning, it feels like PEAK delivers on the promise of VR without demanding a headset or those goofy wands.

A game design tenet I often think about is verbs, or more specifically how the actions the player takes the most often needs to be fun to perform. Platformers live and die by how much fun it is to move, for example. PEAK is entirely about movement, there isn’t a moment where you aren’t actively engaged with those mechanics, and it’s never, ever boring.

K: It’s a wild feeling knowing how committed you become to the tasks at hand. When playing alone it’s gripping knowing you have the world in front of you, and formulating a plan for the obstacles ahead is paramount for your success.

D: Helps that you can hork down every single piece of food between you and that box of flares.

K: With one partner, it’s a collaborative effort in micro-managing tasks unfathomable by one’s self to reach your collective goals. With a max lobby of 4 players, it’s a mosh pit of resource management with the steady tones of small talk in the early levels ascending to full on resume-worthy Project Management by the game’s final climb.

D: The roguelike structure keeps the game fresh, but clever choices were made to foster a sense of community. The island is generated every 24 hours, allowing players to share stories and experiences from the day’s seed, as well as giving speedrunners and achievement hunters space to strategize and optimize. I’m not somebody who typically spends a lot of time on the ever-increasing difficulty settings that games like this love to have, but this day-long consistency has led to me making repeated attempts at ever-higher ascents with the benefit of familiarity, and that’s a testament to the gameplay just being that engaging. We aren’t here because it’s random, we’re here because it’s good.

K: The difficulty is nice for two reasons, one being that PEAK hides nothing behind the stages of difficulty it presents. All the aesthetic choices (outside of your Sash color) are unlocked for your lil’ dude via Badges (ie. Achievements baked into the game that you get to wear proudly on your sash for future runs) and can be completed on the game’s easiest difficulty of Tenderfoot. If you’re feeling a challenge, the Ascents that are unlocked with a completed run on Normal and every higher difficulty above it are tooooough, but so, so rewarding. We’ve knocked out a couple and the change in tone and style in which we play shows the range PEAK provides. You can absolutely fake it til’ you make it on Tenderfoot and have a great time just fucking around the mountain, but you absolutely have to bring your A-Game when you start hitting the Ascents. They will make sure you don’t leave without some cuts and bruises to show for it.

D: I have gripes, of course I do. Sessions are long as hell. At time of writing the world record speedrun is just shy of half an hour. My first attempt at fast soloing was just over 45 minutes. Adding more players only serves to extend that playtime. We have a player who often needs to step away but PEAK simply does not accommodate that, never offering a pause button even when playing offline, meaning he can’t often join us. Sometimes people have to pee!

K: Couple more gripes from me. The levels being procedurally generated does add a fresh element to each day of play, but the visual cues to show what you can stand on and what you can’t are not 100% consistent, and even the smallest modicum of indifference will have you second guessing every ledge and not as a gameplay feature. On more than one occasion I’ve slid to my death because ground was visually showing safety and provided me the math equation for gravity. Also, it’s very rare, but PEAK does suffer from some bugs. Some happen innocently on startup where the game will crash and requires a quick restart, others can kill a run for no real given reason by the geometry of chains or ropes causing your hiker to crack skulls on impact with the lightning quick zip that you won’t know will happen until it’s too late. Hilarious with groups, but still an issue regardless.

D: I feel like a major piece of this game’s success, excellent design and presentation aside, is its price point. This game launched at less than $5, and is a whole $8 MSRP. That’s still a steal. Given the difficulties indie studios have been running into with securing long-term publisher funding or third party investors, this sort of quick turnaround for lower-priced multiplayer experiences seems like a model more studios could and should be aiming for. You could buy PEAK for everyone you know and it’d still come out cheaper than movie tickets.

K: I love seeing Game Jams become overnight successes because as we’ve graciously dunked our whole bodies in the world of Indie, it shows you don’t need a $200,000,000 budget to create lasting memories and fits of ab-crunching laughter. The gaming world needs more of these around the block. 8/10?

D: Easy 8/10. We still on for another run tomorrow?

K: For sure, just gimme a hand!

8/10