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Cairn Review
- Taylor Rioux
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
As the latest release from The Game Bakers, makers of the games Furi and Haven, Cairn is a climbing simulation and survival game that pushes you to your limits, asking a lot of the player in an effort to convey meaning through struggle. In the story, you control Aava, a seasoned mountaineer whose latest goal is to climb Kami, the most difficult mountain of all — one no other climber has managed to ascend.
Publisher: The Game Bakers Developer: The Game Bakers Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released on January 29, 2026 for PS5 and PC |
The climbing controls allow the player to control each separate limb intricately, but it is neither as delicate in its handling nor as punishing on missteps as something like Baby Steps. While the baseline mechanics of climbing are easy enough to understand, the intricacies of those controls are not always intuitive. When you climb, the next limb to be used is automatically selected based upon some combination of placement and balance, but following this auto-selection will very frequently lead to awkward placements and maneuvers, or even put you into detrimental scenarios where the game lifts the only securely placed limb you have.
Thankfully, there is a way to manually select the appendage next used, and it’s a feature I suggest you try and get comfortable with quickly — you’ll need it to reach the summit. I further suggest that you set the manual selection mode to either “dial” (if on controller) or one of the various button settings. The default setting, stick, is difficult to use as it is based upon your character’s posture and, given the less-than-ideal placements you could find yourself in, may limit visibility.
That said, once you have everything set up and are more comfortable with the manual selection controls, man, does this game feel smooth. There were times while climbing where things just started to click, as if I entered some sort of flow state where all of my movements would blend seamlessly into the next before I finally found myself atop the cliff I was scaling. It’s just you against the mountain. And god, does it feel good to win. Even the small climbs feel like earned victories.
Rather than a meter, Cairn uses animations and sound to help signify the quality of your holds and Aava’s condition to the player. Aava’s shaking legs, heavy breathing, and darkening vision add tension to the climbs in difficult spots and show you everything you need to know about your current position. You can mostly tell when you have a solid hold based on her hand and foot placement on a surface. Cairn just has this incredible knack for emulating the tension and struggle of climbing in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a video game before.
This is largely owed to the groundedness with which it approaches climbing. While it is by no means a true-to-life sim, Aava is still just a person (although a freakishly flexible one). She cannot leap from hold to hold; her stamina and grip are actually quite limiting, and when compared to other games that heavily feature climbing, every movement must be deliberate because Kami demands it.
Of course, some issues arise from time to time when climbing as well. The sort of magnetic attachment of Aava’s limbs to surfaces can become a great annoyance in tight spots. In moments when you need to cling to a specific ledge or hold, it is all too frequent that she will instead choose to latch onto an insecure surface. This will happen even when you have your hand lined up in perfect position; sometimes Aava just wants to kiss the Earth, no matter how precise your directions are. There’s no real penalty for death in normal, aside from lost time, but in survival, this ended a run for me. I just could not get her to grab a crack I was aiming at, no matter how hard I tried.
Cairn just has this incredible knack for emulating the tension and struggle of climbing in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a video game before.
There are some nice gameplay options that you can toggle on or off, such as survival mechanics, an auto-save feature, rewinding time from falls, and infinite climbing resources (chalk, pitons, and tape), but doing so permanently marks your save as having used “assist mode.” This is not necessarily a problem, and I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of using these tools to play Cairn, but it is worth noting that even turning them on just to see what happens or how they work will make this mark visible permanently.
The route you take is open, allowing a freeform approach to your ascent to the summit. Do you take a more difficult path that gets you to your destination more quickly or take a safer path that may leave you with fewer resources? You could choose to explore more of Kami to learn more about its history and the people who have tried to climb it, or bee-line straight for your destination. In my first playthrough, I did a little exploring, sometimes going off the beaten path for collectibles and resources, but with so many routes to take and being unsure of how limiting the survival aspects would be, I did not attempt a full search of the mountain. I did much more of that on my second run of the game.
I think that’s when I really fell for the game, to be honest. Truly exploring the mountain in a free-form way gave me such a deep appreciation for the care that was put into piecing together Kami. The mountain is littered with details that I missed on my first trek, like corpses with letters home or abandoned beach chairs in hard-to-reach areas. In some ways, you get to follow the journeys of the people who came before you, reading notes they left behind or seeing the ropes and pitons that might indicate failure.
Those stories mirror Aava’s in more ways than you might pick up on in the first playthrough, testing the limits of what we are willing to put ourselves through, and why we do it. What do we gain by confronting our fears? What do we leave behind in the process?
That story and the examination of Aava’s will and purpose caught me off guard. I truly was not expecting to be so moved by what transpired, yet here I sit, still thinking about the journey and the intense closeness of every moment, the loneliness of climbing up the mountain, how beautifully each event within that story is married so well to the gameplay, and the lessons we can learn by playing Cairn.
When you get to the final moments in the expedition, you will have such a familiarity with what Aava can do that planning your routes and moving up to new areas becomes more of a practice in planning than mechanical performance. You will know where Aava can make a climb just by looking at it, what angle of a cliff face is still scalable, and how far you can move without a strong hold. It is a game that teaches you patience, tests your perseverance, and forces you to accept your failures.
I felt my fair share of failures as well. Moments on the climb where I seemingly hit a dead end or took on a challenge without proper preparation, and was forced to start from my last save — sometimes losing “progress” of up to 30 minutes. Despite those setbacks, or perhaps because of them, I was compelled to contend with my own carelessness; I was driven to move beyond the frustrations of disappointment. Frustrations that Aava lets you know she’s feeling, too. With every fall or struggle, Aava will fume, railing against her own weaknesses and inability to make the climb.
Underpinning all of this is perhaps the best game soundtrack I’ve heard in a long time. The score by Martin Stig Andersen, Gildaa, and The Toxic Avenger is mostly understated, featuring haunting melodies and gentle strings that play during the breathers you get between rock faces, but they are so impactful in expressing the emotion of the moment. I have genuinely broken down into tears hearing the music at times. And that is to say nothing of the more intense and layered synth pieces on the soundtrack.
I fear that my limited musical knowledge leaves me unable to adequately convey just how incredible the soundscape is, but it has engendered in me a feeling I cannot escape. As I sit and listen to the sounds while writing, I can feel a tightness in my chest, a tension rising with every note, and then finally a release at the song's conclusion. It is so perfect for the game itself that it is hard to fathom. It is a soundtrack that is so symbiotic with the story events and gameplay that it becomes impossible to separate them. It is a fundamental part of experiencing Cairn.
It is a soundtrack that is so symbiotic with the story events and gameplay that it becomes impossible to separate them. It is a fundamental part of experiencing Cairn.
Earlier, I said Cairn examines the limits of your patience and tests your perseverance. I learned something about myself in that sense. I was not always patient, forcing paths and holds that were suboptimal simply to try to reach the next segment, only to then fall and become deeply frustrated at the mistake. But I did persevere. Through every hard moment, through every frustration and failure, I continued the ascent, and in doing so, I gained something beyond a simple satisfaction of completing a game.
Rather than focus on the things I couldn’t do, I honed an ability to learn what I could do. To utilize what I know in order to achieve something that at first glance felt so beyond me. As I played, I bore the weight of the stress I put upon myself in every step toward the summit and saw that same weight fall away when I reached the peak itself, as if I were one with the mountain and the stars beyond.
Verdict Cairn is a climbing and survival game that examines the limits of your patience and tests your perseverance. Supported by a phenomenal soundtrack and great acting performances, it presents an exploration of the main character Aava’s will and purpose. In doing so, it holds a mirror to the players, asking a lot of us as well. What is to be gained from climbing the mountain? Why do we do it? What do we leave behind when we face our fears? You’ll only ever know if you dare to try.  |
Image Credits: The Game Bakers
Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.
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