QCF: CAIRN

We all have a vision in our heads of something that we love doing beyond any reproach. A passion that we put on a pedestal, and fabricate this perfect version of what we aspire it to be, and when that drive reaches a fever point, no one else will ever understand your vision. Not family, not friends, and not even colleagues who share your love of the avocation at hand. Everything else starts to lose meaning—or worse yet—become a hindrance between you and the focus you need to lock the hell in for to achieve the goal at large.

Even though we’re all capable of that intense dedication to something we love, there’s a big gulf between someone striving to be the world’s best bowler and someone trying to be the first Alpinist to reach the top of the world’s only unclimbable mountain. A new survival-action title from the same folks who brought us Furi, in CAIRN, from The Game Bakers, aims to challenge the limits of human tenacity, both through the lens of Aava and the personal state of mind she finds herself in, and the symbiotic level of perseverance that players will need to guide her to the peak.

As simple as that all sounds, it’s the execution of CAIRN’s buildup and turbulent framing of Aava’s quest to surmount Mount Kami that sets it apart as an experience that’s unlike anything I’ve played before it—an experience that constantly teeters between being a tale of inspiration and a cautionary tale of self-destruction.

Normally, I try to avoid spilling my guts over how good the graphics are for the games I sift through with a critical comb, but when the visual design of the title is an ingredient that’s imperative to the experience, then that’s what I take the chance to make an exception. Which brings me to the ocular element to CAIRN—it’s a sensory overload in all of the right ways—the ways that want you to take in the real enormity of its world and the specific mountain it inhabits.

The art style of CAIRN places a heavy emphasis on the line work of its textures and models using a Ligne Claire-like design within its shaders, all while rendering the look on top of a Cel-Shaded framework, resulting in a composition that really sets the benchmark of Cel-Shaded graphics to an entirely new level. Except for environmental effects like the weather or other elements, everything else on screen is given this super-refined definition that gives the setting and the matter inhabiting it an edge that can be perceived, which not only effectively carries the distinctive art style of the graphics but also drives the crux of its main gameplay loop—climbing.

Despite some weirdly specific instances where players will have to suspend their disbelief for the sake of maintaining Ludonarrative harmony, the mechanical foundation of CAIRN’s climbing is meticulously dense otherwise, taking dozens of chaotic factors into account with every move a player makes in their ascent up Mount Kami. For all of the physical conditioning Aava has undergone in her extensive mountaineering career, there’s still a sense of weight to her movement—a deliberately slow-paced stride in her step that conveys the gravity of her survival pack with every step or grasp that’s planted. As clunky as Aava moves on flat ground, however, it’s a completely different story when she’s faced against an upright surface of jagged rock and mineral. The jaded Alpinist offers a surprisingly empowering sense of grace behind her movement whenever she’s vertically scaling the mountain—well, at least when you get a handle on the climbing mechanics anyway, because calling them complex would be a tremendous understatement.

After a player mounts a wall, control of Aava will quickly shift to a new paradigm where players will navigate the climber’s movement through her individual limbs, lifting and planting the respective leg or arm to their next scaffold, and do so all while balancing the integrity of Aava’s grasp on the mountainside with her remaining appendages. In addition to committing your ascent up the rock wall one limb at a time, these moves are further compounded by Aava’s physical state during the climb, taking into account her levels of energy, nourishment, and hydration that players will need to manage under real-time survival mechanics like gathering, cooking, and resting. Forcing Aava to continue without properly maintaining those life metrics will significantly erode her climbing ability, causing her movement to be sluggish and her previous grip to be far less reliable. In an effort to balance out the danger of scaling the mountain’s perilous heights, a climbing bot will accompany Aava, and what quickly becomes one of the silliest aspects of the experience is also a welcome reprieve from the game’s many obstacles. As players approach new summits, they’ll be greeted with even more routes to plot, each with their respective degree of difficulty. Aava’s robotic sidekick will be right behind her and give her the ability to drill steel pitons in the crag of the mountain. Planting a piton into the mountain will give players the chance to mount a personal checkpoint that will catch Aava should she fall off the mountain any time after the fact. Additionally, a tied piton spot will also give the British Alpinist the ability to catch a breath and recoup some of her spent energy before hitting the rock wall again to the next prefecture. During these treks, finding a flat prefecture to stand on is crucial, as Aava will then be able to command her Climbing bot to retrieve all of the pitons that were used back into her inventory for the next stretch of climbing. As relieving that all may sound though, excessive Piton use,  or poor application of the life-saving spike into the wall, will result in them crumbling into pieces and prevent them from ever being used again. Luckily, players can still salvage the pieces from destroyed Pitons to reconstruct a new one, but the trade-off of wearing down two pitons with the grace of only recovering one back is still a pretty risky gamble that can really hamper players who don’t delegate their piton deployment better.

It’s in these limitations, though, that CAIRN’s gameplay loop subtly enforces a tactical approach to an otherwise ostensibly action-oriented game that players wouldn’t normally stake so much thought into, and what really conveys the sense of adrenaline and stakes you’d expect out of climbing. What is normally an entry-level route to the next prefecture can rapidly descend into the clamber from hell if Aava hasn’t rested enough or is starving from hunger and/or thirst. Satiating Aava with these bare essentials to living means that players won’t have to contend with the breakdown of the bare essentials to her climbing talent, like grip strength and endurance. The dynamic is admittedly an awkward mesh that takes some time to get used to, and can be rough going in the first hour or so. Nonetheless, the climbing mechanics are still solidly designed, and complemented with a pacing that will organically hammer its nuanced concepts into the further you go, to where progress up Mount Kami starts to feel like a careful ballet of footholds and handclasps in between periods of eating and resting. Now, while the learning curve behind seeing the invisible thread of CAIRN’s climbing gameplay is a daunting process, the multiple options to approach the act of climbing make the process far more palatable.

For all of the realism you stuff into a video game, however, you can’t take the game out of a video game, because all of those crucial snacks and water canisters you gather along the way can be refined through a simple cooking mechanic to grant Aava multiple perks to enhance her climbing abilities. Stumbling across a beehive will net you a precious cache of honey, and when brewed with a steamed pot of water, will grant a mountaineer a hot thermos of tea . Drinking the tea will not only quench Aava’s thirst, but it’ll also give her a boost in body heat to help stay extra warm in colder climates, and a timed buff to her stamina recovery, grip-strength, and grit against other dynamic elements of the climb, such as wind or slippery surfaces. Cooking presents another risk/reward system in itself, though, because Aava’s inventory management is done with a Resident Evil-like storage system that takes the size and shape of these confections and the precious bag space they occupy into consideration.  Although there’s some control over optimizing your bag space with some well-timed shakes like it were a Magic 8-Ball, with similar results that could play into or out of your favor when everything settles back in your bag. The best course is to make use of what you gather and cook at the most ideal moments, where and when you can, fleshing out that survival gambit to its fullest.

Now, this next gripe may honestly be the most subjective take, because in the reality of its core design, in motion, I know that the default gameplay settings of CAIRN’s climbing fundamentals objectively work, and I’ve already seen some impressive gameplay from other players in that regard. Still, I would be remiss not to mention that with the game’s default setup, the climbing had initially NOT clicked for me—like, at one point, I almost gave up on the game and this review altogether. Thankfully, The Game Bakers implemented some really flexible tooling for the Climbing mechanics that allowed me to set up a personal default that turned my experience completely around when I configured the settings.  These two settings of note impact the nature of Aava’s climbing movement with added visual indicators that better telegraph the effectiveness of payer movement on the rock wall. The first being that whatever limb is selected as the appendage for movement can now be lit up like a nightlight, significantly improving the response time for players to act with when it comes to determining their next move with the extremity, which can often be a crucial decision at various points of a climb. The other, and arguably more significant setting change (and something I admittedly believe should have been integrated into the default build of CAIRN’s climbing dynamic) is an added Grip strength indicator that will now generate a visual cue on that signals reliability to every clasp and foothold you make with Aava. I can’t tell you how much of a game-changer this setting alone is as it fundamentally allows players to climb with a lot more confidence instead of just exclusively eyeballing the affair otherwise.

Ultimately, the juxtaposition of managing these elements in real time as they sap away while you chart progress up the mountain makes an already harrowing journey that much more stressful.  Like any skill, practice makes perfect, and the underlying message of any fall that doesn’t kill you is just another chance to climb back up, a sentiment that helps set the stage for the real theme of CAIRN.

Like Ahab and Moby, the main character has developed somewhat of an obsessive grudge against the mountain that has developed into this mental callous that ironically steeled her against the dread of Mount Kami. As determined as she is, however, this intense drive of passion to conquer the world’s most dangerous mountain has also impacted her emotional health, straining her relationship with loved ones, and seemingly, her grip on reality as simply being a person who exists outside of climbing. The further you play CAIRN, the more diegetic its gameplay loop becomes to the overarching narrative that unfolds, and I honestly can’t express to y’all just how poignant the writing of it all can be when it comes to finding the allegory of Aava’s quest to something that I can also be toxically passionate about. There are many moments where Aava is challenged to articulate why she’s so determined to finish this one thing she cares so much about, and yet can’t really explain why she cares so much about it in plain words, because it has become deeper than compulsion. The foil to this theme is another climber that players will encounter on their way up Mount Kami, named Marco, and although they share a bond over the power and freedom that climbing gives them, the poor guy is not as downbad for the goal of reaching the peak like Aava is. It’s in this dynamic that the story starts to shift into some heavy territory, as CAIRN offers a level of liberty towards how players navigate this particular conflict, with some key choices that are presented to you in the latter half of the game that were surprisingly deeper than I ever anticipated they would be. Compounding your encounter with Marco, a fellow mountain climber, to the scattered messages from the people you left behind, like your partner, Naomi, and your annoying, yet well-meaning agent Chris, it steadily becomes clearer that Mount Kami isn’t a goal to Aava—it’s an escape.

The layers of detail and nuance to the plot progression driving this very intense, and often painstaking journey up the mountain make for one of the most harmonious synergisms a video game story could ever have with its direct gameplay. Aside from the dumb Star Wars-ass “Johnny-Five” looking robot that unrealistically accompanies you up the craggy walls, I haven’t felt this immersed with what was happening on screen in a video game such a long, LONG time.

CAIRN is a must-play in 2026 and is easily the best release that The Game Bakers have brought out yet. Whether or not this game has sparked any inkling of interest from you, I highly recommend you snag it and experience the journey that I did—it’s an incredible take on the Human Condition that proves the depth of immersion between a player and a Video Game is a powerful thing.