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Insurmountable review: a clever roguelike about mountaineeringBuilt to scale
Built to scale
Everything I know about mountain climbing came from a corporate team-building day where management hired a banker who’d scaled Everest to tell us how he left most of his group to die in order to reach the summit. This wasn’t a guilty confession. Apparently there comes an altitude where halting becomes so dangerous that it dooms any dawdlers. You carry on going or expire on the spot. As the then editor of a failing games magazine I couldn’t see any reading of the metaphor where I wasn’t the struggler and my website peers weren’t being told to leave me. Hilariously, this was not the bleakest moment of the day (that was some nervous guy from IT bellowing “Show me the money!” to win book tokens or similar bullshit).
Insurmountable | Launch Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Insurmountable | Launch Gameplay Trailer
It’s when one of these four meters hits zero that critical events start triggering with regularity, battering that all-important health bar. From my runs it splits into a game of two halves. At lower levels, the riskiest stat is stamina, as that requires sleep to replenish, and napping on the mountain turns you into a human popsicle if you don’t have a cave or a tent, which only has limited uses. You also don’t want to be hitting caves during the day - you want to sleep away the nights, as everything drains faster and the mountain is visually obscured - or in friendlier weather, which should always be exploited for a few extra hours of unmolested hiking.
On normal difficulty this is reasonably forgiving, relaxing even, as you soak in the ambient calm and make smooth progress between narrative event tiles. These let you gamble time or stamina for a chance to discover an XP-rich story nugget or pry a thermos of coffee from the hands of the dead. Go on, make that sociopathic banker proud. With the right perks - unlocked as you level up - and lucky equipment drops, it’s reasonably easy to find replenishing loops on this gentle ascent, freeing you to pillage every narrative tile, amassing thermoses (thermi?) and oxygen tanks for the harsh heights.
Hit the death zone, however, where the air thins, and the oxygen meter finally comes into play, and with it a complete shift in mentality. Now every nap or detour is sucking precious O2 from your tank and, unless you lucked into several spares lower down, it’s going to push you into riskier shortcuts and the misfortune only piles up from there. Even on a well prepared climb, with generous equipment drops and your desired perks, I’m always surprised how rough it gets up here - that it’s called the Death Zone should have been a clue. It’s a really effective bit of drama, and instils a juicy dose of fear for future runs.
I think the game could also be more explicit about how its own route suggestions optimise time over stamina use - before I cottoned on to that simple fact, my runs were being cut short time and time again. Get into the habit of plotting tile-to-tile journeys and your success shoots up. Of course, now I’ve told you and they don’t need to patch it. Although, on that, the team does seem receptive to criticism and keen to tweak; already since release they’ve added more event tiles (much needed, I was sick of seeing the same goat again and again) and given character classes unlockable skills for the start of a run - a much needed foothold.
Oh, and a quick note on the characters. I love that of the three - adventurer, scientist and journalist - it’s only the journalist that comes to the mountain without a tent. This captures the writer mindset perfectly. Frankly I’m amazed their entire inventory doesn’t just consist of Kendal Mint Cake. That’s all I brought with me when my Scout troop visited Snowdonia. I made it about an hour of hiking before I got tired, made a fuss and got to sit the climb out in the troop minibus.
