If you look up popular quotes about life, a common theme crops up — ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’, or ‘practice makes perfect’, and so it goes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that, though it’s painful to admit, these cliches have hung around for a reason and are often true. But I’ve found few games that crystallize these ideas as meticulously as Cairn, the latest adventure from indie studio The Game Bakers, which has players embark on an epic climb up a massive, unforgiving mountain.
“After making (Furi and Haven), I wanted to dig even more into the absolute search for freedom,” explains Emeric Thoa, The Game Bakers’ Creative Director. “While thinking about that, I remembered this fascination I have for alpinism stories, and I thought that could be the way to talk about the search for absolute freedom.”
Belay-ve in yourself
Scaling Kami may be a sizable task, but success is surprisingly granular. Any surface on the map can be gripped, though not all walls are made equal. For example, if you move Aava's hand to a flat surface, or worse, one perpendicular to the earth, her arms and legs will shake violently, and a vignette will start to take over your screen – an event like this can lead to a progression-crushing fall. Similar to the process of learning to boulder, you’ll quickly learn whether a shoulder twinge or toe slip spells disaster or not.
“You can fail by managing your stamina poorly, but somehow make it through the wall,” explains Thoa. “Or you can start to really lose your stamina, shake your arm, or adjust your position,” he continues. “If you feel it's too tense, use a piton. If you still manage to fail that, you're gonna fall eventually,” Thoa notes. Thoa goes on to explain that even a fall doesn’t mean your run is over, and you can climb back, ascend the rope, or choose a new path to one that’s more approachable. “That's how we approach balancing,’ he says. “We try to make sure we can always make a comeback from a failure.”
You and your character ultimately share the same experience, which is not the case in any other game
While the team was keen to ensure the initial experience wasn’t overwhelming, they also wanted to make it accessible to players of all kinds, especially if you find yourself on the verge of giving up. “If it's too much for you, in the options you can activate (settings) like the rewind option, which lets you rewind time before your fall, or other options like infinite pitons.” From here, there are plenty of options to pilfer, including a tool that highlights the limb you’re controlling to make movement more legible, or a feedback system that provides a visual effect when you manage to get a good hold. The assist mode, available when you start a new game, also lets you turn off survival needs and commits autosaves as soon as you hit solid ground.
There is an alternative mode for the masochists out there, too, and The Game Bakers also included a Free Solo difficulty that mimics the real-world sport of scaling rock faces without safety equipment. “At one point, we said: in real life, there are real climbers who climb without ropes and risk their lives if they fall,” Thoa explains. Initially, the team considered making the default mode without save points (called bivouacs), meaning you could exit and come back, but death was permanent.
Realising this wouldn’t appeal to all players, they eventually settled on save points, though they kept the idea as a mode. While Thoa estimates most players will take around 15 hours to complete the game, he noted that by the end of development, the studio's QA lead, Lara Comoy, could complete the climb in under two hours without falling once – good luck replicating that at launch!
Still, failure is an important, often unavoidable, aspect of Cairn’s sticky gameplay loop, one signposted not only by the pools of blood that stain the bandages across Aavas's hands and legs, or by her labored breathing, but also by her impassioned screams that go off like a kettle boiling as you slip down a rockface. “We realized (professional climbers) actually do scream a lot, and it's because it's extremely frustrating and it's extremely painful,” Thoa notes. “I thought it was the really strong signature of that sport, and that lifestyle.”
The expletive yelps also help solidify the relationship between Aava and the player, with Thoa noting that in Cairn, the goal was to align on a shared feeling of exasperation. “You and your character ultimately share the same experience, which is not the case in any other game,” Thoa says. “When you are playing Resident Evil, Leon Kennedy doesn't react at all like you would – if I was at his position with zombies, I would just run,” he jokes.
The screams are particularly effective, due to Cairn’s otherwise natural soundscape. Departing from the studio's penchant for musical presence, Thoa and the team decided that Cairn needed contrast. Alongside the tweeting of birds and pattering of raindrops, The Game Bakers created a system called ‘Mountain Intimidation’ that shifts the environmental sonic landscape depending on what angle you’re looking at the peak. “If you look at the sky, then you look back, and you see the mountain, then you will hear the wind and the birds,” says Thoa. “But if you raise your head and look at the wall, and it's overcoming, then you will hear it.”
When the musical soundtrack — a collaboration between Martin Stig Andersen (LIMBO, INSIDE, & Control), Gildaa, and The Toxic Avenger (Furi) — finally appears, it inspires hope with a clever blend of twinkling orchestrations and upbeat rhythms. “Sometimes, you earn it, and it's a bit of a relief,” says Thoa. “(You can) let go of your emotions, you deserve it, now you can walk – you're safe,” he explains. “But, five minutes earlier, we wanted you to focus on the rock and your hand placement, your breathing, and that's it.”
Human Pretzel
Any players not in the loop on specific climbing positions may find Aava’s movements unbelievable, particularly as she flexes her legs to create surreal angles. “Actual climbers do things that normal people don’t expect,” Thoa points out. “Sometimes, when I was play testing the game with people external to the team, they were saying, ‘Ah, look, it's ridiculous.’ But then I show the picture of a real guy doing the same thing, and they’re like, ‘What?’” During our conversation, Thoa detailed a real maneuver called a heel hook, in which climbers pivot their ankles to create tension in their legs and form a 3rd arm. If you don’t believe me, I implore the skeptics out there to perform a short Google search and enlighten themselves to the secret moveset alpinists unlock by allocating all their skill points into traversal.
Naturally, there is some bending of the truth here, too, and Thoa was happy to admit that Aava’s flexibility isn’t 100% grounded in realism either. “There’s a real pleasure to just making it, even if it's about cheesing the game and exploiting some things that feel unrealistic,” he says. “When I tried limiting it to something more realistic, it was less fun and felt more punishing.” Even with some give, Thoa was quick to point out that climbing with reckless abandon will still ultimately lead to falling. “It's not a good way to climb. In order to actually manage to do it, you still have to keep a position that feels correct.”
It seems lighthearted on the surface. Yet Cairn balances its tone with gritty realism through weather-worn memorials and hidden cadavers. “It’s part of the experience of actual alpinists… they’re used to seeing dead bodies,” Thoa notes. “Sometimes (in-game) we put them as skeletons, but most of the time (in real life), because they are kept in ice or at very high altitudes, they are still there.” Thoa and the team were keen to showcase the darker sacrifices climbers make in search of freedom. “Some people die, some people do leave their family behind, because it's months of preparation. It's a very costly passion,” he continues. “It's not only a happy sports simulation.”
This serious tone plays into Cairn’s survival systems, with Aava needing to balance a variety of satisfiable needs like thirst, hunger, stamina, exhaustion, and health, to ensure efficiency and avoid death. “When you're climbing, your goal is the summit, but at some point, you will have to find water, a place to rest, some food, or collect resources – maybe there is a bag with leftover pitons that you can grab,” Thoa notes. “Is (the player) gonna want to go left because there is a waterfall, or right because there is a cave, and maybe in the cave there is something useful?” they continue. “It's secondary, but it's part of the immersion and of the building of your own story.”
It helps that on top of Aava’s own narrative threads, there are plenty of lore-filled caverns to rifle through, eroded into pockets of Kami’s punishing carapace. Here you can find notes, photos, and carvings that speak to the people who came before. The more you hunt for these tidbits, the clearer Cairn’s rich story becomes. “It really feels more like an adventure game than a climbing game,” Thoa admits. “There’s more than one hour of cut scenes, and lots of exploration.” A joint effort from Thoa, Audrey Leprince (The Game Bakers CEO), and French author Mathieu Bablet, Cairn’s narrative explores the isolating culture of the extreme sport. “Everybody reflects on their life in the mountain, and at the end of the game, we hope you end up thinking… What's my own Summit?”
Wrapping Up
One of the more impressive aspects of Cairn is the attention to detail. Water trickles from natural sources and multiple kinds of rock, leading to all manner of grip-based issues. Perhaps the most impressive of the bunch, though, isn’t a natural effect, but rather the carefully directed animation of Aava re-taping their fingers. “You can't imagine how costly it was, because it's really old school,” Thoa laughs. “We don't use procedural or AI, and the tape is actually a rectangle that has 60 or 80 bones that we animate,” they add. “It's like two months of animation.”
From a game perspective, this action is key to increasing grip and integral to surviving the challenging ascent. And, while handy, Thoa also felt this process would connect players to the finicky intensity of the sport. “The reason, except that we are a bit stupid in our own passion, is that while watching the documentaries, I saw climbers taping their completely destroyed fingers just so that they could keep going,” he notes. “For me, it was really impressive. It’s a small detail that you can really imagine – it makes it more concrete how crazy they are.” Thoa explains you can’t do the process wrong, and it’s not challenging. Instead, it can restart momentum before you make your way up a new cliff. “Before going again, I'm gonna prepare, I'm going to plan, I'm going to tape my fingers,” Thoa adds.
Speaking about the slew of alternative climbing experiences on the market, Thoa noted how modern climbing games differ from releases in the past, particularly the on-rails experiences of the 2000s. “I think Cairn, Baby Steps, and Peak share a new approach to climbing, which is that the three games give a character that can move in a very specific way and an environment, and it's up to you to climb it,” Thoa notes. “The designer doesn't really know how you're gonna manage to do it: here is volume and geometry, here is your character, and just go there.”
Pointing to series like Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider, Thoa explains that, when it comes to climbing, these games lean on pre-designed animations, which leads to players having the same experience. “Modern climbing has a much freer approach, and it's more systemic, and we don't really know how players will succeed, so I think it's interesting,” he continues. “I wish people would react to having played Cairn by playing other games later and wanting more of that freedom for climbing.”
This interview was conducted days before Cairn’s official release, and, having already suffered a delay out of 2025, Thoa expressed that he was keen to get the launch over and done with. “I think we need to have the release so that I feel like I’ve made the summit,” he jokes. “I feel like I'm just above walking, and I have still one week of hiking before I'm there. It's terrible,” he laughs. “I really want it to be like tomorrow or the next hour. I can't wait anymore!” Still, Thoa is proud of the experience and, despite this nervous energy, is keen for players to dig in themselves. “ I think it achieves what I wanted to achieve as an experience. And it's not going to be for everyone, but it is going to be memorable for the people who are into it.”
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