Jusant makes you place each hand

Climbing in big action games is usually a ride. The hero hauls up a cliff while you hold the stick forward and wait for the ledge. Jusant, Dont Nod, 2023, refuses the ride. Each hand is placed. Stamina is a length of rope you can feel running out. The path is a decision about which hold you trust, not a corridor painted to look like stone.

Immersion, in this case, is not the view. It is the number of choices between the bottom and the top. A spectacular cliff with one input is a film. A modest wall where a bad hold costs you the pitch is a climb. The game can still be kind about failure. Kindness is not the same as taking the hands away.

Climbing in big action games is usually spectacle with almost nothing underneath it. The hero hauls themselves up a cliff face or a crumbling tower while you tilt the stick forward and wait.

The gap between those two experiences is the whole problem. On screen there is exhaustion and terror and a long drop. In your hands there is one direction held down for minutes at a time.

Jusant closes that gap. It is a quiet, meditative trip up an enormous mountain, and climbing is the only way forward, so the climbing itself had to be worth doing. It is.

On the wall, the left stick is a cursor hunting for something to grab. Sweep it across the rock and the climber reaches out whenever the cursor lands on a real handhold.

You are picking the hold, not being routed to it. Nudge the stick a short way from center and you get a close grip; push it out further and the climber stretches for a distant one.

Which trigger you pull depends on which arm is moving. Left arm, left trigger. Right arm, right trigger. Whichever trigger you pulled has to stay down while you go looking for the next hold.

What comes out of that is an unusually tight loop between hands and character. Extending the stick reads as extending an arm. Trading triggers back and forth reads as hand over hand. Squeezing a trigger is a grip you are maintaining, and releasing it is a grip the climber loses.

Early builds took the body metaphor much further. One gave all four shoulder buttons a limb, arms and legs alike. Another had you drag the stick away from a target to load up a coiled crouch, then let go to launch at a far hold.

Both were more faithful to how a body actually moves, and both were a nightmare to teach and to perform. What shipped keeps the part of the mapping that reads instantly and throws away the part that turned the controller into homework.

Cutting is the lesson there. Depth is not a function of how many inputs a mechanic occupies. If it were, QWOP would be the summit of the medium.

The name for this is kinesthetic design, where the shape of the input mirrors the shape of the action you are watching.

It is why a longer press on the button sends Mario higher without anyone explaining it. Why hauling back on the stick to drag in a ghost in Luigi's Mansion lands so well. Why the up-then-down flick of a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater manual has a snap to it. And why a fighting-game motion can make a fireball feel like something your hands wrote.

Other climbing games got partway there first. Shadow of the Colossus turns hanging on to a giant into a literal clench of the controller. Grow Home splits the climber's hands across the two triggers.

Jusant's contribution is running that idea through a plausible human body with weighted, grounded animation, instead of a rubbery character who folds in impossible directions.

A control scheme built on sustained, coordinated finger work will shut some players out. Motor impairments make the coordination hard, and long trigger holds are rough on anyone dealing with repetitive strain or limited hand endurance.

So the accessibility options are load-bearing, not a garnish added at the end. Jusant includes ways to soften the input, which is what lets the expressive scheme stay in the game without becoming the only door into it.

The takeaway is not that every action deserves a physical imitation in the hands. It is that physical mapping is worth reaching for when it strengthens the fiction, and worth relaxing the moment it starts hurting or excluding people.

The other half of the hollowness is mental. Most climbing systems ask for no problem solving, no decisions, and none of the planning that makes the real activity absorbing.

Climbers call a route up a wall a problem, and they mean it. Getting up is not purely strength and endurance. It is working out the sequence of holds, how to shift your weight between them, and which grips and body positions carry you to the next one.

Jusant reaches for that feeling with two pieces of equipment: the rope and the piton.

Every climb opens with the rope already clipped to a carabiner fixed in the rock. Slip, and the rope arrests the fall so you can work your way back up.

Pitons go further. Hammer one into the wall and it becomes a checkpoint, so a later fall stops you at that piton rather than dropping you back to the start.

You get three of them, and that scarcity is the design. Every placement is a judgment about where the wall is genuinely risky and whether whatever comes next deserves the piton more than the ground you are standing on.

The result is a save system folded into route planning rather than bolted on outside the fiction.

The rope is more than a fall-arrest device. It runs to exactly 40 meters, so part of reading a wall is checking that you have enough line left to finish the section you are on.

Sometimes the answer is a shorter route. Sometimes it is climbing back down to pull a piton that is dragging the line off in an unhelpful direction.

And because the rope is simulated rather than decorative, it catches and knots itself around the scenery. The thing keeping you alive on one pitch is the thing fouling your line on the next.

A few concessions keep that from souring. Close to a ledge the rope will give you a little extra reach so you are not defeated by a half meter. Relay points reset the line's anchor entirely, handing you a mid-climb target and letting long ascents continue without dropping you onto flat ground between every stretch.

Climbing and jumping alone confine you to whatever sits directly around the climber, because a hold only counts if it is within arm's length or one leap away.

Rope work blows that open. Set a piton, drop down the line, start swinging across the face, and the reachable area becomes a wide arc instead of a small circle. Holds on surfaces you could never have stretched to come into range.

The game eventually takes that into the third dimension. You climb a face, drop beneath its underside, and swing out past it onto a separate wall standing further back.

Then it adds a clock. Certain plants can be coaxed into sprouting handholds, but those buds shrivel in direct sun, so you move fast and lean on your pitons to cover the risk.

On its best walls, Jusant plays like old Tomb Raider: read the volume of space in front of you, then work out the sequence that gets you across it.

Input and thought are only two thirds of it. The third is stakes. A climber can look petrified on a swaying tower, but if failure costs nothing, none of that fear reaches the person holding the controller.

Jusant does not generate much fear either. Death is essentially off the table. Invisible walls fence off the easy plunges, and letting go mid-climb just puts you on the end of the rope.

Even falling is uncommon. Draining your stamina is the usual cause, and the final stamina design is forgiving. Effort spends the bar, big jumps temporarily shrink its ceiling until you find flat ground, and clicking the stick to rest refills it. Running dry generally means you ignored several obvious invitations to pause.

Stamina ends up as a meter you tend rather than a threat you fear, which is a long way from something like Shadow of the Colossus.

None of that is an oversight. Jusant is built as a serene, unhurried adventure with the pressure removed, sitting much closer to Journey than to a punishing climbing sim.

Read the game that way and its choices line up. Friction, frustration, and harsh punishment were taken out on purpose, because each of them would have broken the flow the game is chasing.

It also means the problem solving deserves an honest description. The rope, the pitons, the relays, the stamina bar, and the living handholds are all smart, but none of them are aiming at brutal route puzzles.

A game can be undemanding because there is nothing there, or undemanding because it is aiming at a different feeling. Jusant is mostly the second kind.

That points at a wider habit worth breaking. Reviews and postmortems love to fault a game for lacking a system it was never reaching for in the first place.

Plenty of climbing sequences in action-adventure games have no interest in simulating real climbing. They are breathing room after a fight, a pacing device, or a way to move the camera somewhere new. A full climbing simulation would sabotage all three jobs.

Other genres run the same trade. An intricate web-swinging model rewards players chasing mastery, but a superhero game may want everyone to feel superhuman inside the first minute instead.

So the useful question is not whether a system could go deeper. It is whether going deeper would serve the experience this particular game is trying to produce. You usually find that out by getting the build running and playing it, not by arguing about it on paper.

Taken on the terms it set for itself, Jusant is one of the better references available for traversal that actually immerses.

The controls bind your hands to the climber's. The rope does four jobs at once: safety net, planning constraint, physics nuisance, and a way to enlarge the space you can reach. Pitons make checkpoints scarce enough to be decisions. Stamina adds grain without souring the mood.

It is also a study in knowing when to stop. Harsher, more realistic, more technically demanding versions were all available. It took only as much climbing friction as it needed to make movement feel authored, then defended the calm it was after.

A game with different ambitions can find plenty of unclaimed ground here: real risk, tougher route puzzles, stamina with teeth, consequences that bite. For this one, the light touch is the point.

Jusant had company that year.

Storyteller built a whole puzzle game out of dropping characters, objects, and themes into comic panels until the story matched the prompt. Terra Nil inverted city-building into ecological repair, asking you to heal a dead landscape and then erase every sign you were ever there. Shadows of Doubt procedurally filled city blocks with residents, daily routines, jobs, physical evidence, and murders to solve on a caseboard.

Pseudoregalia delivered precise 3D platforming dressed as a lost N64 game, with movement tech deep enough to break the intended sequence. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom made Ultrahand legible and flexible enough to build vehicles, weapons, and improvised solutions. Viewfinder let photographs become impossible geometry you could walk into. Chants of Sennaar built a tower-climbing adventure around deciphering languages.

A strong year all round. Jusant stands apart because it took a verb that normally decays into passive spectacle and made it tactile, considered, and continuous with the mood of everything around it.

In the Flockbay app, describe a short wall and a climber whose hands you place one at a time. A fall should cost the pitch, not the afternoon. Play it. If you can reach the top by holding one direction, the hands are still decorative.

A cinematic platformer template is the nearest shape. The AI platformer maker should not be given a jump button for this one.