Calvin Dimas
Your entire body shakes as you tighten your grip around a rock as thin as a playing card. Gravity begins to pull you down, and you feel your body start to slip. All your muscles are screaming as you push yourself just a little bit higher and make it onto the top of a cliff where you can finally rest. That is what it feels like to play Cairn, a climbing survival game developed and published by The Gamebakers.
As someone who has been climbing for two years now, Cairn was an easy sell as it combines two of my hobbies, rock climbing and video games. While one activity involves much more exercise than the other, both climbing and video games scratch the problem-solving part of my brain that I’ve learned needs constant stimulation. If you’ve never gone climbing before and don’t understand the connection, the quick explanation is this. Climbing involves you finding the optimal route to make it from the ground to a pre-determined destination that will challenge both your physical attributes as well as your puzzle-solving skills. For someone who has spent all their life playing games, it’s a type of physicality that clicks nicely with my brain.
There have been other rock climbing games in the past or games that have featured climbing as a part of their core gameplay, but Cairn is a game that feels like it was made by climbers for climbers. You begin the game as Aava, a world-renowned rock climber whose goal is to climb to the top of Mount Kami. As the player, you actually start your ascent in a rock climbing gym to help you learn the basics of the game and practice some of the different types of routes you’ll encounter. Once you feel confident enough to move on from the gym, you’ll scale a wall to climb out into the world, where it is you versus the mountain.
Managing the Ascent
Cairn is not just a game that focuses solely on climbing; you’ll also need to manage Aava’s hunger, thirst, stamina, and inventory to succeed. You’ll find natural water to keep you hydrated, snacks, and items left behind by other climbers who abandoned the challenge, as well as notes left behind that give you some insight into the history of Mount Kami. Along with your survivability meters, such as hunger and thirst, you’ll also need to keep track of your pitons, which will allow Aava to anchor herself to the wall and take breaks to recover. They also act as a contingency plan if you push Aava too far and fall.
While climbing, you’ll have independent control of Aava’s arms and legs, and must place her hands and feet in the right spot or risk falling. This is where it is very evident that this game was designed with climbers in mind. Other games that feature climbing might have a character climb by simply moving up or shimmy across a wall, Cairn asks you to be very deliberate in where you place each of Aava’s limbs. Do not expect simple movements that only require a few directional inputs. When playing Cairn, you will need to ensure that Aava is fully supported if you want to progress. In many cases, you will need to get comfortable with moving into a less secure position temporarily while risking Aava plunging to the world below.
Experience Required
Reading routes is something the game does try to teach you in the climbing gym, but I think non-climbers may struggle with this. For example, there is a common climbing technique called flagging that involves you placing the side of your foot against the wall to create friction. This technique helps stabilize your body when no foothold exists and is a technique that actually works in Cairn. However, it is not something the game teaches you, and to me that is a letdown. There are easier difficulties for players who have never gone climbing before, but the intended difficulty feels like you should have some kind of climbing knowledge before beginning the game. There are moments in the game when Aava shares climbing tips with other character but it happens over halfway through the game and feels like it should have been earlier on.
To be blunt, Cairn is hard. Even if you know how to climb and do it as a hobby like I do, Cairn is a test of persistence and patience. Rush through a difficult spot too quickly and you’ll likely see Aava hurdling off the side of Mount Kami or further down the wall forcing you to start back from a checkpoint and retrace all your steps. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that you are constantly on a timer. There is no visible clock ticking down, but instead your survivability meters such as hunger and thirst will slowly tick down over time forcing you to stop to recover or explore Mount Kami in search of food or water. If one of your meters runs out, Aava will black out and you will have just a few minutes to find food, water, or shelter; otherwise, you must face the consequences of a game over. Even with my climbing experience, I died a lot. Sometimes it was due to mismanagement of resources because I ate too much of my food early on, other times it was because I got overconfident and could not react quickly enough to stop Aava from slipping and slamming face-first into the abyss below. Even though Cairn can be quite challenging, nothing can beat the feeling of pushing ahead and making it to the next safe area to take a break.
Cairn takes this concept of pushing yourself hard for the sake of accomplishment and dissects that view in its story. It is not a story that is told very directly, as you’ll mostly learn about Aava and the world through voicemails or from the occasional conversation she has with other climbers you run into. It’s very easy to tell that Aava is determined and that climbing means everything to her, but some of these conversations start to hint that something else is building narratively in the background. No spoilers for the story, but it ramps up in the last fourth of the game and goes places I never would have expected and provides players with an ultimate life or death choice.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Cairn is a unique game that has nothing else like it out in the indie scene, let alone the gaming scene right now. It is not a perfect game, but its challenging gameplay and story easily make it one that stands out and will have an impact on the player. If you enjoy unique, challenging games I highly recommend Cairn, but know that learning a little bit of climbing technique goes a long way.
Cairn released on January 29th, 2026 for PS5 and is available on PC on Steam, The Epic Games Store, and GoG.
Our Score 8.5/10
