Mountaineers and climbers, especially the free-solo kind, are humanity’s most fascinating maniacs: single-minded, daring souls who throw themselves into profoundly optional life-endangering feats. It is hard not to be compelled, and appalled, by someone like Alex Honnold. Even with ropes, a single wrong move can mean death in mountaineering, a mad human activity that puts you at the full mercy of nature. You cannot help but wonder what kind of person willingly chooses this: what kind of person looks at a towering cliff face, or a wall of wind-whipped ice, and thinks, I bet I can get up there.
Aava, Cairn’s protagonist, is that kind of person: a champion climber, a woman who has conquered summit after summit, butand for some reason can’t walk away. Before her stands Mount Kami, an ice-tipped, Himalayan-style peak that has never before been climbed. Kami was once home to a tribe of people, whose remnants you find as you pull yourself up each section of the mountain, but now you are very much alone. Controlling Aava’s limbs, you move her hands and feet towards imperfections in the rock, jamming her fingers into cracks and her toes on to tiny ledges. You quickly learn to read the mountain, as Aava would.
Despite the absence of real-life peril, Cairn makes your heart race and your mouth go dry. When Aava’s limbs start shaking and she starts breathing more urgently, you know she’s not secure on the cliff face; you’d better reposition her feet fast, or take a gamble and try to screw a piton and clip in before she loses her grip. And you have limited life-saving pitons, so you’d better conserve them. At one point I was stuck halfway up a bare rock face after climbing all night, with no pitons left and no respite in sight in any direction, and I had to perform a terrifically stressful 10-minute climb towards a cave without putting a foot wrong. I got desperate right at the end and Aava nearly slipped as she pulled herself up on to the final ledge. I had to put the controller down and do some deep breathing before I could continue.
In this respect, Cairn is a wonderful survival game. It feels perilous, as it should. In addition to managing Aava’s hand and footholds, you have to manage her backpack, scavenging, foraging, trying to find water wherever you can (tip: keep every bottle you find). You must laboriously bandage her ruined fingers to preserve her grip, when you get a moment to rest. And with that sense of danger and suffering comes a sense of accomplishment, when you prevail. The relief that I felt whenever I found a safe point where Aava could set up her tent was intoxicating.
As hours pass and conditions get worse on the mountain, Aava’s obsession with conquering Kami starts to feel not just impossibly brave but self-destructive. Cleverly, the game invites you to question why she’s doing this – and why you’re doing it. Especially towards the end, this is not an easy game (though you can always turn on some assists to make it less pitiless if you want). There were sections where I fell off the mountain over and over, failing to find a good route, parched and starving. Dangling from the rope for the 15th time, I became immensely frustrated with myself, and Aava voices her own frustration every time you fumble a hold. I should probably have walked away and taken a break for a while, but Aava’s stubborn determination was rubbing off on me.
Cairn, as much as a game about climbing and nature, turns out to be a game about what it takes to be the kind of person Aava is – and the cost. I was floored by the ending, which had me crying on my sofa at one in the morning. There were many moments of beauty and terror during my ascent that left me quietly awestruck. That awe, in the end, was proportional to the hardship.
