With little preamble, you find yourself planted at the foot of a colossal tower, stranded in the middle of a barren wasteland under a baking sun. This arresting sight sets the scene for the vertical adventure that lies ahead in Jusant, the latest release from developer Don’t Nod. Your only instructions are to start climbing upwards – no reasons given, save for a faithful companion nestled in your backpack. Together with this cute critter named Ballast, you begin scaling the sheer rock face using intuitive climbing mechanics centered around your trigger fingers.
While simple on the surface, mastery of the tactile climbing takes practice. You quickly learn to read the tower’s rocky façade, spotting cracks and outcrops to reach for. Choosing efficient but safe routes, managing your stamina, and using anchor points wisely soon becomes second nature. Though missteps are forgiven with a gentle fall back to your last lifeline, the sense of accomplishment from conquering a tricky overhang or swinging across a gaping ravine is palpable.
This carefully balanced gameplay forms the beating heart of Jusant’s meditative experience. The persuasively realized environments also play a key role, dynamically transitioning as you climb into the heavens. Pockets of civilization and moments of beauty become more scarce, even as the view grows more breathtaking. Like breadcrumbs, scattered letters and artifacts gradually reveal fragments of a far grander mystery. But Jusant isn’t overly concerned with definitive answers or high stakes. Instead, it wants you to focus on the journey, conquering the tower inch by inch, while unraveling a poignant environmental narrative.
With its imaginative world and absorbing climbing mechanics, Jusant promises a unique adventure. Let’s strap on our carabiners and see if this compact climbing odyssey can deliver enough intrigue and rewarding gameplay to justify the arduous ascent.
Mastering the Meditative Climbing Mechanics
Jusant’s pure focus on climbing shapes its entire gameplay experience, from the responsive controls to the tower’s treacherous terrain. While straightforward on the surface, learning to scale its dizzying heights takes patience and practice.
The tactile sensation of climbing is convincingly realized through the intuitive trigger button controls. Each trigger guides one of your hands, allowing you to reach and grasp onto bits of rock and flora. Early on, this can feel clumsy. But after getting accustomed to reading the environment and planning your route, your motions become more fluid and natural. Finding a smooth rhythm between alternating your hands, scrambling up ledges, and using your finite stamina wisely is crucial.
This demands reading the contours of the mountain itself – spotting where you can rest your aching arms, or gaps where you’ll need to swing across using anchor points. Here, Jusant exhibits masterful level design. The tower morphs before your eyes as you ascend, transitioning through varied biomes like sun-baked cliffs, grassy overhangs and dim caverns. Traversing these inorganic, yet believably natural environments proves constantly engaging.
Memorable challenges include navigating the nesting grounds of migratory pebble creatures, whose skittering bodies form temporary platforms. Or braving the strong winds coursing through the exposed mountain pass, which will actively work to dislodge your grip. Your faithful companion Ballast also lends a hand at key moments, providing a welcome break in the climbing. By awakening plants, it can conjure vines, petals and mushrooms to forge new paths.
Beyond the self-driven challenge of plotting your route, Jusant provides additional optional objectives. These lead you to uncover scenic vistas, hidden caves with cultural artifacts, and even extinct wildlife frozen in time. Seeking out these rewards encourages you to comb through the environments. Since the lively world is as alluring as the climbing itself, exploration feels wholly organic rather than a chore.
Accessibility options ensure these avenues for exploration are open to all. From unlimited stamina to simplified climbing mechanics, you can tailor the experience to match your needs. Coupled with the forgiving nature of tethering yourself to anchor points, Jusant remains approachable without sacrificing engaging gameplay.
In fact, the climbing demands ever-increasing mastery not through punishing difficulty spikes, but through your own growing proficiency. As your familiarity with the mechanics deepens, you gain the confidence to plot more ambitious routes in pursuit of efficiency and style. Since Jusant avoids padded skill trees or XP systems, your sense of progression is driven by this increasing climbing prowess. It fosters a rewarding gameplay loop where reaching new heights and uncovering hidden corners of the tower becomes its own reward.
This elegant balance of engaging mechanics, inviting environments and optional depth allows you to climb at your own pace. Whether you charge upwards rapidly to see the sights firsthand, or methodically comb every inch, Jusant caters to varied playstyles. Its meditative core experience lets you set your own challenges, and approach the engrossing world as you see fit. For a game centered around a seemingly simple activity, the compelling freedom and nuance on offer is remarkable.
Unraveling a Poignant Tale of Perseverance
As captivating as the climbing mechanics may be, it is the fiction subtly woven throughout Jusant that gives purpose to your ascent. By anchoring its narrative in the environments themselves, it crafts an impactful tale of love and perseverance.
The most immediate details come from the arid wasteland surrounding the tower, making it clear some cataclysmic event has occurred. Intact ruins and personal artifacts indicate a once thriving civilization inhabited the structure. Their language and culture seems Mediterranean in influence, though any clues to what disaster befell them remain unclear.
This shroud of mystery is by design, as Jusant is not overly concerned with exposition. Instead, it wants you to piece together the fragments of history at your own contemplative pace. The tower almost becomes a Mayan-esque monument to explore, illustrating how inhabitants adapted and endured despite inexplicable calamities.
The core narrative thread centers around poignant letters penned by past climbers. Some detail mundane hopes and dreams, bringing humanity to this forgotten people. Others hint at shifting social dynamics in the face of disaster. Their informal exchanges reveal how communities clung to normalcy and relationships, maintaining hope even as their world transformed.
Your journey mirrors that of a climber named Bianca, whose journal entries chronicle an expedition up the ever-perilous tower. While her fate is unknown, she serves as a touchstone. By experiencing the hardships she endured, a deeper connection forms. Her quiet perseverance becomes yours.
This environmental storytelling approaches exposition as part of the challenge. Letters tucked away in ruins encourage exploration. Murals brought to life by your companion Ballast add mystique. Even while frequently pausing to rest your grip, you remain invested in the world and its lost inhabitants.
These tales, told primarily through the lens of enduring love and friendship, instill the journey with poignant hope. Jusant refuses to dwell on the inevitable decline this civilization faced. Instead, it celebrates the shared struggle to retain purpose and cherish bonds when fate conspires against you. Your ascent becomes a meditation on the resiliency of the human spirit.
Some questions remain necessarily unanswered. The nature of the tower itself is ill-defined, and the full story of what caused the apocalypse is left ambiguous. But Jusant succeeds in evoking the emotion of the world. Even if the history remains shrouded, the present acts of devotion and sacrifice shine through. Through efficient and heartfelt environmental storytelling, it builds investment in characters you only know through the words and artefacts they left behind.
Artistry and Sound Design in Service of the Climb
Complementing the well-realized climbing, Jusant’s artistry and sound design create an absorbing atmosphere that pulls you into each stage of the ascent. Both visuals and audio work in harmony to make your ever-changing surroundings feel alive.
The dizzying sense of scale as you climb into the heavens is captured through the tower’s extraordinary draw distances. Pausing at an overlook reveals the full tapestry – ruins dotting the mountainside recede into the hazy distance below, while an endless sky looms above. Witnessing biomes gradually shift from Mediterranean greenery to barren rock injects your progression with tangibility.
Vistas become more breathtaking the higher you climb, but the art team lavishes equal attention upon the finer details too. The excellent environmental art gives inhabited areas a rich sense of history and culture. Mosaics, murals and architectural flourishes make ancient settlements feel lived-in. Gentle swaying grass and delightful pebble creatures scurrying about infuse vitality into the world.
The soundtrack cultivates a matching air of melancholy and wonder. Soulful piano melodies pair beautifully with the ambient winds during introspective climbs, giving space for reflection. Rousing strings crescendo at moments of revelation, synchronizing seamlessly with scenes of natural wonder. Together with the sound design, which amplifies the tactile sensation of scrambling up stone and sending pebbles tumbling below, the audio actively complements the experience.
Both in sweeping scale and finer points, the visuals and audio fully commit to bringing the vertical world of Jusant to life. drinking in the sights and sounds works hand-in-hand with the innate joy of movement. As you fluidly scale cliffs and swing across vistas, the sensory experience feeds directly into the gameplay itself. Sublime art direction and an evocative soundtrack turn the meditative act of climbing into an active spectacle.
Why Jusant Begs to be Played Again and Again
While fairly compact in scope at just 3 hours, Jusant contains multiple avenues for replayability. The freedom of route plotting and option to approach the world at your own pace lends itself naturally to additional playthroughs. Many players will feel compelled to scale the tower again, applying their mastery of the climbing mechanics to seek out more efficient paths and take in sights they may have missed.
The accessible nature of the world also makes revisiting earlier portions effortless and rewarding. Finding collectibles like letters or completing optional objectives can be done in a non-linear fashion across multiple attempts. Speedrunners will likewise appreciate the invitation to perfect traversal and exploit sequence breaks.
Overall, Jusant’s balance of gripping gameplay and hidden depths in both narrative and environments make repeat climbs feel fresh. Your growing familiarity with the tower only enhances the experience, as you push yourself and uncover nuances that reinforce the satisfying core. It is certainly a brief adventure, but one that dedicates fans will be eager to reprise.
An Uplifting Vertical Odyssey Not to be Missed
At a brisk 3 hours, Jusant is far from an epic 100-hour saga. But what it lacks in sheer scale, it makes up for with a laser-focused experience that wrings substantial depth from elegantly intertwining just a few core elements. This clarity of vision is rare, and absolutely refreshing.
By wholly committing to realizing an engrossing climbing mechanic, then supporting it through smart level design, charming visuals and understated narrative, Jusant creates something greater than the sum of its parts. It leverages the joy of movement itself to drive investment in its ruined world. The environmental storytelling works harmoniously with the desire to keep pushing upwards.
Make no mistake – this is firmly targeted at a niche audience who value slower, more thoughtful experiences. Those seeking high octane action or complex RPG systems will undoubtedly bounce off its meditative core. But taken on its own terms, Jusant provides a poignant adventure where the climb itself becomes symbolic of enduring humanity.
The gradual mastery of its climbing, the personality instilled through vibrant art direction, and the hopefulness of its scattered narrative all coalesce into a brief yet magical journey. Once it gets its hooks in you, its subtle charms take hold for an experience that lingers long after itsruntime.
Jusant won’t reshape the gaming landscape, but it carves out such a distinct and rewarding space that judging it on scale alone misses the point. This compact climbing odyssey bottles up memorable adventures in its runtime. For anyone compelled by the meditative thrill of movement and discovery, it absolutely delivers. The trek to the heavens can’t come recommended enough.
The Review
Jusant
Jusant's focused climbing mechanics and imaginative world create a brief yet magical vertical odyssey. For anyone seeking a meditative, slower paced experience, its charms come highly recommended.
PROS
- Absorbing climbing mechanics that feel tactile and responsive
- Tower features imaginative environments and puzzles
- Freedom to traverse at your own pace
- Relaxing, low stakes approach encourages mastery
- Evocative visuals with stunning draw distances
- Environmental storytelling unravels an intriguing mystery
- Letters and artifacts provide well written backstory
- Hopeful tone focused on bonds and perseverance
- Accessibility options ensure inclusivity
- Overall a meditative and poetic experience
CONS
- Story leaves some questions unanswered
- Could benefit from more robust side content
- Falls lack tension since you can't lose much progress
- Camera can occasionally be unwieldy
- Might be too sedate and short for some players
- Lack of supporting characters beyond Ballast
- Narrative woven subtly so can be missed
