Phrasemaker

Reviewed on PC

We all have an obsession at one point in life. Such an obsession can take many forms and varying intensities, but it is usually temporary. You see, obsessions are, by definition, destructive. Even if you’re obsessed with something positive or healthy, you’ll eventually transform it into something else.

There are some rare occasions in which obsessions aren’t temporary, though, which brings us to Aava. Cairn is as much about Aava as it is about Mount Kami. It is also about Marco, Naomi, Capsule, and every unnamed skeleton hanging from a rope during your ascent. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mount Kami is a fictitious mountain in a mostly realistic world. Aava and this world’s climbers are assisted by climbots, relatively smart robots which serve as an ultra agile climbing partner carrying a nearly endless supply of ropes.

Outside of the impossibly tall mountain and the climbots, though, Cairn is realistic. No one has reached Mount Kami’s summit. A while ago, tourists were able to visit high points of the mountain, but never the summit. The ferry system has been abandoned for years now, though.

On your journey to the summit, the only characters you’ll meet are climbers and troglodytes, which I won’t go into here. All these characters serve as a cracked mirror to Aava, a reflection that isn’t quite right. All of them have some kind of inexplicable connection to Mount Kami, but in their own way.

Aava is a renowned climber, perhaps the world’s best. She is famous enough to be on the cover of climbing magazines and Chris, her agent, keeps pestering her about a documentary. One of the characters she encounters, Marco, is a fanboy.

Despite how successful she seems to be, Aava doesn’t seem to care. In fact, she doesn’t seem to care about anything other than Mount Kami. Naomi, her partner, leaves voicemails every once in a while. At first, she sounds worried yet excited for Aava. But later it becomes obvious that she doesn’t understand why Aava left her, and their sick cat Capsule, behind.

Besides the ever-useful (unnamed) climbot, Aava is doing most of the climbing on her own. The majority of the characters she bumps into are equally alone. Through letters left behind one quickly figures out that, even those that came to Mount Kami with someone, ended up alone.

At its core, Cairn is a sports game. You are doing one task, with very minor changes, for the entire time you spent with the game. Cairn is as obsessed with climbing as its protagonist. There is a survival aspect to it. You’ll find food and water. You can cook it à lá Breath of The Wild to mix and match bonuses.

You’ll find items to aid you on your journey, but it all revolves around the black hole that is climbing. You’ll find pitons to prevent Aava from falling, food keeps you warm in higher altitudes or improves your grip for a few minutes. Chalk gets you safer hand grips for 12 tries. Climbing tape allows you to keep your fingers intact.

Yet the climbing system is so fleshed out and dynamic that it remains engaging for the 12h to 15h you’ll spend with the game. You control Aava’s limbs, one by one. Cairn automatically chooses which, but you can take over by activating manual control using R1 (RB) and the right analog stick for limb selection.

Following the excellent tutorial, the climbing system is quite intuitive. It might look janky, at times, but never unfair. Like with any other sports game, you’ll feel yourself getting better, reaching closer to the prowess that you imagine Aava to have as a renowned professional.

You’ll get greedy and fall after a section that was trickier than it seemed, only to complete it easily the next time around. A few hours into your climb, you’ll notice that you rarely use Self-Screwing Pitons anymore. You become one with Aava, who in turns is one with the mountain.

A lot of this intuitiveness is brought on by the fantastic voice work done by Sophia Eleni, Aava’s voice actress. The dialogue is undeniably great, but what truly took me by storm was how phenomenal the rest of the acting is.

Aava grunts when she is losing a hold, screams in pure rage when you fall a considerable height. Her breath trembles when she doesn’t have a safe hold, yet it sounds calm and soothing when you’re in a relaxed position.

Immersion reaches its peak when the phenomenal voice-acting is paired with excellent audio work overall. Additionally, The Game Bakers have done one of the best haptic feedback implementations I’ve tried outside of Sony exclusives. If you own a Dualsense control, I highly recommend it.

Despite the stylized artstyle, which looks beautiful and true to the developers previous work, and the sometimes janky, ragdolish animations, Cairn ended up being one of the most immersive games I’ve played. I caught myself letting out a long exhale after a particularly difficult section on multiple occasions, and having to lean back into my chair due to the intense gamer lean that had taken place.

The cherry on top of the cake expertly concocted by The Game Bakers is, as usual, the soundtrack. Courtesy of Martin Stig Andersen, Gildaa, and The Toxic Avenger, it is a haunting album that paints a picture better than any real color could. It rarely plays, but it shows up at exactly the right moments, the punctuation that elevates the poem.

A survival horror disguised as a climbing simulator, Cairn is, above all else, an innovative experience. Like Skater Story, it shows how underutilized the sports genre is. It is, in more ways than one, The Game Bakers at their best. With Cairn they’ve reached their summit, at least of the mountain they’d been climbing so far.

If Furi was gameplay perfected with a mild hint at a narrative, and Haven a deep narrative experience with decent gameplay as a backdrop, Cairn is the marriage of the two. An incredibly polished and innovative gameplay loop intertwined with a powerful narrative that will stick with me for years to come.

Like the best works of art out there, Cairn leaves you with questions that only you can answer. Perhaps you’re not able to answer them now, but you might, one day.