Like the meteoric rise of real-life bouldering, climbing games are having a moment. Climbing toward the craggy peak of a mountain in real life is, to no one’s surprise, quite different from the rock climbing in most adventure games like Uncharted. While these games have players double-jumping or swinging on rocky surfaces to advance, more titles centered around the cadence of climbing are quickly forming a genre in their own right. The prospect of calibrating your limbs and adjusting your equipment as you head toward the apex—which reflects the motions of climbing—is finally an experience now accessible to non-climbers. 
 

Jusant

Within the arid deserts of Jusant lies a massive mountain—one that houses the remnants of a long-gone civilization that thrived when its people made a living as sea and mountain nomads. As a young climber seeking to restore the ocean to this land, you’ll be climbing cliff faces with meticulous, deliberate care. Rather than just steering the climber toward a general direction, Jusant gives you control of each hand, so you can reach toward and grab the handholds you need. It’s a deeply intuitive way to climb, and this is compounded by the handy use of pitons, which can anchor you to the wall so you can climb much longer distances. Even in the event of falling, you aren’t likely to fall to your death.

Adding a wrinkle to Jusant’s climbing is its stamina gauge. Climbing any surface burns through your stamina, but this can be regained by resting on the wall. However, the stamina bar shortens ever so slightly the longer you remain hanging. It’s a quirk that elevates its mechanics from just mere locomotion to a thoughtful puzzle. And alongside a soothing, ambient soundtrack, climbing in Jusant becomes a wonderfully meditative experience.
 

Insurmountable

When compared to the eco-fantasy of Jusant, Insurmountable appears more rooted in reality. As a mountaineer conquering the snowcapped summits of a perilous mountain range, you have to plan your ascent, tile by tile, under the harshest of weather conditions. It’s a far cry from the straightforward mountaineering of most games, but that’s also because Insurmountable is more akin to a roguelike. The unpredictability of each climb is your biggest obstacle. In this game, you’ll not only need to manage your oxygen levels, but also your energy, body temperature, and even time. Embark on a climb at night, for instance, and the frigid cold can chip away at your stats.

Few games challenge you to plan your climbing route like Insurmountable, which treats this process like a puzzle to be overcome, much like the realities of planning a multiday climb. That said, certain skills can make the climbs in Insurmountable easier to manage. One of the most popular builds is the Journalist, a playable character who can ignore bad weather conditions—a particularly useful skill for amateur climbers. While there are no feats of dexterity to be performed in this game, the thrill of a successful expedition makes confronting the immense heights of Insurmountable especially rewarding.
 

A Short Hike

A Short Hike dials down the realism factor when it comes to climbing. Rather than playing as a human, you're a young canary named Claire on a vacation at Hawk Peak Provincial Park. The plucky heroine, however, has run into a problem: She’s waiting for a phone call from her mom, and the only reception available is at the peak of the park’s summit. Thus begins her climb—and chance meetings with several new friends—toward the top.

Claire may be a bird, but flying straight up to the peak isn’t an option for her; she still needs to gather enough resources for the climb. These are in the form of Golden Feathers, which offer her additional stamina to scamper up the park’s precipitous mountain. Scattered across the park, Golden Feathers can also be found by interacting with your fellow hikers, some of whom will ask for favors in exchange. Others just want to spend time with you. In the end, climbing is still largely a communal activity, and A Short Hike succinctly captures the beautiful mundanities of the moments in between climbs. 
 

Surmount

The effortless fluidity of mountain climbing can be an enchanting sight. But this isn’t the case in Surmount. Climbing in this game is deceptively simple but potentially violent and disastrous. You can manipulate your left or right hand to latch onto a rock face. However, what complicates matters is the ability to traverse greater distances by flailing yourself wildly on that singular arm to propel yourself across rocks. Hopefully, you’ll be able to grab onto a crevice before plummeting to the rocky depths below. The catch is that swinging can drain your stamina, and you’ll need a sizable amount of it to scale Mount Om, the highest (and probably the most difficult) mountain to scale in the world. And then there are terrains of various textures, with certain surfaces that are more difficult to grab hold of than others.

Much like the absurdity of seeing ragdolls vault between walls, the act of climbing in Surmount is hilarious. Here, momentum is king: Get the timing right, and you can hoist yourself up the mountain as efficiently as possible. And if climbing ever gets too rough, you can always grab a friend for some help, since both of you will be connected to the same rope and anchor. For better or worse, you’re tethered to each other.
 

Death Stranding

Sam Porter has an unenviable job in Death Stranding: to deliver massive, cumbersome cargoes across the often treacherous terrains of post-apocalyptic America. Making this more difficult are the game’s unfavorable weather conditions, such as pouring rain and the dreaded Timefall, a type of precipitation that ages what it touches and erodes your cargo. 

But even though there’s a lot of hiking to be done, what’s often overlooked is the intricacies of climbing in Death Stranding. Unlike the bulk of climbing games, footwork and weight shifting are usually overlooked, which are both skills that are vital to mountain climbing, and you’ll need to manage both with great care. Add the challenge of managing Sam’s oversized cargo—the equivalent of hoisting a giant hiking backpack—to the mix, and you can get a pretty solid facsimile of mountaineering in Death Stranding. At the same time, climbing ropes and anchors enable you to scramble up and descend the game’s more precarious slopes with greater ease.