Jusant Review: At the Top of the Don’t Nod Mountain

My rope snagged, pulling me down before I could reach the creaky wooden beam across the gap. I bit my lip, watching myself dangle haplessly on the tower wall. My climbing gear was reliable and the structure was sound, so that left only one option: my brain was the roadblock here. I retraced my steps around the curve of the tower, removing the secondary anchor pin I had been using as a fallback. I inched carefully back to the gap in the wooden beams, held my breath, and jumped, that little bit of extra line giving me momentum. This time, I made it across and continued my adventure in Jusant.

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Clear as Crystal Rock Formations

This is all gamers of a certain age need to know: Don’t Nod basically made a free-form climbing game out of Riven‘s cliffside village. It’s a mixture of Mirror’s Edge‘s kinetic movement speed and Shadow of the Colossus‘s strategically deployed calm—basically, my personal kryptonite. You and your Ballast—an adorably blobby blue creature—are climbing a tower. This tower was a once bustling oceanside network of people run aground by climate change and resource squabbling.

The fate of the tower is painstakingly documented through letters, notes, posters, and articles. Other small touches, like decayed environmental clutter and interactable cairns, emphasize that if people were here, they’re long gone. Life still persists, though. A vast network of bugs, plants, and chocos have made their home out of the village’s husk.

Jusant’s relative restraint is surprising and reinvigorating. For better or worse, the rest of Don’t Nod’s pedigree tends to lean more towards pyrotechnics: Remember Me’s synth bombast, the over-the-top dialogue of the Life is Strange franchise, the heartfelt melodrama of Tell Me Why. Although the in-game tooltips are generous (perhaps overly so), Jusant keeps direct guidance to an absolute minimum, giving you space to get way too into and/or out of your own headspace.

For most of its short but sweet runtime, you hear nothing but your character, your companion, and the world around you. When the score does kick in, you’re in for a real treat. There are no other visible human beings or spoken dialogue. It’s just you, huffing and puffing your way up the mountain. By the time I scaled the final summit, I knew the sound of my character resting (a deep sigh, shaking out their wrists one a time) and of a jump gone terribly wrong (a startled “augh!”). Jusant’s deliberate pockets of sound only added to my immersion.

Just Enough Rope To Soar (Or Snag Yourself With)

Your core tools are simple: you have a coil of rope, which can be extended and retracted using a mechanism on your hip, and three pitons which are secondary anchor points that can be attached anywhere on a vertical face that’s large enough to hang onto. When the rope is yellow, it indicates you have plenty of coil left. When it turns blue, you’re more than halfway through the coil. And red, well, red means you’re about to run out of coil.

The coil of rope has physics. You can swing from it, wall run with it, and—as I did many times—get it snagged on something. Left and right triggers control each hand’s grip, left and right bumper loosen and tighten the rope. Face buttons are used to jump, attach and detach ropes or pitons, and interact with environmental objects. Clicking in the left stick lets you rest and recharge stamina, even in the middle of most actions. Left stick moves your character, right stick adjusts the camera.

While your core toolset is shockingly flexible, you quickly learn it is not quite enough. Prior residents have left relay points where you can recharge without penalty, jammed metal rungs into cliffsides, and left pitons of their own with colorful ribbon, indicating good spots to place anchors.

After your ballast wakes up from their nap, they can help you interact with the natural world via the D-pad: extending plant vines, calling bugs, and others I’ll let you discover for yourself. My favorite early creatures are the skittering rock bugs you can use as moving handholds, but the rest of the game’s biomes are no slouch. Improbable life and color teems from almost every crevice of the Tower’s tan-crusted desert rock.

Ballast or Bust

I won’t mince words: the Ballast is not just another Blorbo. I would protect them with my LIFE. Their presence went from enigma to invaluable in a matter of minutes. It goes beyond their environmental surprises too—their range of squeaks and burbles usually hint at something nearby, a makeshift echolocation that served me well in more complex segments. Their presence sheds light on some of the collectibles from past residents, culminating in an ending sequence wild enough to take my breath away and emotional enough to make me cry a little bit.

The Verdict: Mountain GOTY

Jusant’s reach never exceeds its grasp. Smart use of player tools, generous checkpointing options, and a full spectrum of sound take a simple premise to its absolute peak. The deceptively simple climbing and exploration constantly remind you that you are a single point in a larger ecosystem.

Don’t Nod manages to balance out the potential nihilism of its premise with tight spacing, freewheeling player control, and sheer hope. Frankly, it’s the most refreshed they’ve felt in years, even if Jusant eschews the more dialogue-heavy precepts of Life is Strange. It instantly joins my pantheon of life-changing video game mountain climbs, along with Journey, Celeste, and A Short Hike.

We may have limited tools, but if we reach beyond ourselves even a little, we can start forming the ruins of a society insistent on self-reliance into something communal and new. It’s too easy to reduce the future of the planet to a simple binary: civilization or annihilation. Jusant explores the cavernous space between those two poles and lets you swing through it in full motion.

Masterpiece

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