Death Stranding is a 2019 adventure game from Kojima Productions. Starring Norman Reedus in the role of Sam Porter Bridges, Death Stranding is a game about navigating difficult terrain. Typically games have a reasonably frictionless interaction between the player-character and the ground – a hill in Call of Duty provides cover and interrupts sightlines, but you never have to account for gravity. It’s not harder going up and easier coming down – you slide along in both directions at an identical pace, as if you were floating rather than running. Death Stranding turns that lack of friction into a question. What if coming down a hill, you could lose your balance? Where other games have your inventory disappear, what if you could see everything your player was carrying? What if your gear had a measurable effect on your movement – what if it slowed you down, could unbalance you? If you load your gear in Death Stranding too heavily on one side, you’ll fall over. If you run too fast downhill, you’re at risk of tripping. Death Stranding explores the practical implications of movement and weight. It’s almost shocking to play the game and realise the stakes – you start thinking about these things that you never normally have to think about in games, and every other movement system – every other game – starts to feel shallow by comparison. The ground takes on this unbelievable texture. Mud’s slippery, rocky terrain is dangerous – you don’t want to roll your ankle. You start to look at different approaches up to higher areas, explore different routes to figure out what’s easier. It’s all the basis for a bonkers Hideo Kojima game about a post-apocalyptic postie delivering mail between survivors in their nuclear bunkers – normal Kojima behaviour – but with such depth and character centered around a very basic game mechanic.

Cairn is a 2026 mountain climbing game from The Game Bakers, the French developers behind Furi and Haven. Where Death Stranding is about the difficulty of trekking over open country, Cairn is about rock climbing. You play a mountaineer, Aava, making a solo ascent of the majestic Mount Kami. It’s again a game about the difficulty of movement, of finding and navigating a path up the rock face. In other climbing games like Assassin’s Creed or Shadow of War, climbing has a sort of de facto nature. You can essentially hold the up button and scale the side of the Florence Cathedral – maybe you have to do some pathfinding, but the physicality of movement is never a problem. You never get tired or sore. Cairn, by contrast, has a series of interlocking mechanics based on the strength of each hold and your overall stamina. You find footholds and handholds and you move to the next one, one limb at a time. Left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot. There’s an emphasis on biomechanics, the way in which you actually move a body. Your ability to bend your legs is the core of your upwards movement. You bring your leg up to a foothold and use it to push off, coiling it into a seated crouching position and then extending the leg and pushing your torso up. Raise, plant, launch – like climbing the stairs. Cairn brings to climbing what Death Stranding brought to travel.

The slightly shocking thing about Cairn is how still everything is. For all of the tension, it’s a game where nothing moves. There’s no active opposition: nobody’s shooting at you, nobody’s racing you. There’s opposition, but there’s no agency behind it. The mountain isn’t out to get you. The rock face sits, blunt and flat, formed over thousands of years by tectonic shifts and the natural elements. It exists in itself and without reference to human frames of meaning. Success and failure in Cairn then only reflect your ability. You are the only moving part. If you fall, there’s no-one else to blame. The mountain hasn’t changed. It’s not done something unexpected. It is what it was, and you approached it wrong. You’re going to have to figure out a better way. Sometimes you can find alternate paths – especially early on – but once you’re going up the Needle, there’s really no way around it. You have to come to terms with what the mountain is, which means coming to terms with your body. If you’re going to move forward, you’ll do it along paths that will not change. Everything will stay exactly where it was when you fell. The only thing that changes is you.

In a sense, your battle in Cairn is really against yourself. If you fall, it’s because you spent too long in a poor position – you have to manage your body better. That theme of self-control is reinforced by the game’s survival mechanics. Beyond falling off a mountain, you can get tired, hungry, or cold – or on a larger scale, you can fail to plan ahead, run out of food, or make such little progress that a continued effort becomes untenable. I gave up on my first game – I spent way too long trying to get across a chasm to the first troglodyte statue, all my pylons broke, and I didn’t have any food or water. I ran out of the resources to make a reasonable effort forward, and I had to start over.

At play in this conflict between human climber and impassive mountain is a longstanding narrative tradition of the human against nature. There’s something of Moby Dick in this game: Aava’s pursuit of the summit is like Ahab’s pursuit of the whale. In both, the protagonist confronts the sublime, riding on the back of a natural force that they can navigate but not control. The ocean and the mountain both contain those aspects that Burke assigns to the sublime: they are vast, majestic, terrifying. In his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke writes that the sublimity of God is the scope of His unlimited power: “But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before Him.” Something of that scale is contained in the mountain in Cairn. It is annihilating. Its stillness and silence are markers of its immensity, its absolute disregard for you and your goals. You do not merit its attention.

Aava’s attempt to climb the mountain is thus an attempt to connect with something bigger than herself and also a piece of self-aggrandising myth-making. Aava claims that she’s climbing the mountain to come into contact with something, to connect with the universe or with some kind of higher spiritual unity. In the game’s opening moments, over a backdrop full of stars, Aava tells you “All I ever wanted was to touch eternity for an instant.” At the summit, you’re invited to fulfil that desire: “Be part of a whole”. It’s almost zen, except for the part where Aava can’t reach that sense of peace and clarity without climbing the tallest mountain in the world. It’s an act of connection, but she’s running away from her friends and family. During her climb, Aava receives constant phone calls from friends and colleagues. Her girlfriend calls to tell her about their sick cat, and her agent calls to ask for pictures or news for their corporate sponsors. “We’re a team!” he complains. Aava responds to none of these calls, and later rips the antenna off her robot, so she can’t receive anything further. In her pursuit of the summit, Aava isolates herself. She’s hostile to community and connection. One early call is her friends and family singing her happy birthday – they’ve all come together to celebrate her, but she’s not there. When she meets a fellow mountain climber, Marco, she’s rude and snippy. Marco calls to his robot, Samy, and Aava scoffs: “You named your robot?” He replies: “Of course! Didn’t you?” His gentleness and open nature show up Aava as kind of an asshole. She’s singularly focused on reaching the summit, to the unnecessary detriment of her social relationships. She urges Marco on, trying to instil in him the same fire that she has, and Marco ends up pushing beyond his safe limits. She’s pursuing transcendence, but it’s destructive. She wants unity but runs away from relationships. She seeks connection by climbing up the face of an unresponsive mountain that is so much bigger than her and utterly indifferent to her existence, and she reproduces that indifference in her behaviour towards the people around her.

There’s something wrong with Aava. Maybe it’s her relationship with her father, who put her on the climbing wall at three. (Marco: “Great guy, huh?” Aava: “So they say.”) There’s something needy in her quest to conquer the mountain, to find purchase in a hostile, unwelcoming environment. It’s sad that she can only find connection after putting herself through gruelling physical trials. Near the end of the game, when the mountain gets really dangerous, there’s an option to turn back with Marco, to admit defeat and head back down. Turning back represents a psychologically healthier option for Aava. Marco embraces her, and she’s drawn back into her social networks, reconnecting with her girlfriend Naomi. Turning back requires Aava to turn away from the pattern of behaviour she’s demonstrated throughout the game. It’s a rejection of the mountain, and in some ways it’s a loss – a failure – a change.