At lower levels, the riskiest stat is stamina, as that requires sleep to replenish, and napping on the mountain turns you into a human popsicle if you don’t have a cave or a tent, which only has limited uses.

From my runs it splits into a game of two halves. It's when one of these four meters hits zero that critical events start triggering with regularity, battering that all-important health bar. I’m always surprised how rough it gets up here - that it’s called the Death Zone should have been a clue. Well, as long as you don’t mind taking a longer route, which means more time in a place that is draining your heat, sanity and, at greater heights, oxygen. Then there’s also the issue of height difference, with a heavy stamina cost for scaling taller cliffs, enough to encourage you to clamber up more forgiving baby steps instead. Tiles are rock, snow or ice, which affects the stamina drain of crossing them, and have varying degrees of stability, which raises the odds of an accident occurring. It works by breaking the mountain into hexagonal tiles, which has a weird side effect of rendering each peak as a towering mound of Giants Causeway basalt or something out of the next Halo game. Just as a concept, I want to celebrate the cleverness of it all. This is not a polite hobby where you bank your progress for another day, and in this sense the do or die of a roguelike run feels more honest than the hilly simulations of Death Stranding or myriad VR climbing walls currently available. In this sense, Insurmountable’s decision to equate mountaineering with a survival roguelike is astute: one life, one run, all the while coping with the random luck or misfortune dealt by an unpredictable landscape. What stuck with me is how all or nothing a climb could be, something you commit to until you either get a killer anecdote or end as another speck of colourful polyester in Rainbow Valley. Hilariously, this was not the bleakest moment of the day (that was some nervous guy from IT bellowing “Show me the money!” to win book tokens or similar bullshit). As the then editor of a failing games magazine I couldn’t see any reading of the metaphor where I wasn’t the struggler and my website peers weren’t being told to leave me. You carry on going or expire on the spot. Apparently there comes an altitude where halting becomes so dangerous that it dooms any dawdlers. Mountain climbing as a roguelike: a surprisingly taut genre fit, occasionally let down by fiddly execution.Įverything I know about mountain climbing came from a corporate team-building day where management hired a banker who’d scaled Everest to tell us how he left most of his group to die in order to reach the summit.

Insurmountable review