Spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

In the fall of 2019, my wife and I started climbing at our local gym. We fell in love immediately. It was a cathartic challenge—physical, yes, but also deeply mental. There’s something uniquely satisfying about staring at a wall of coloured holds, mapping out a route, failing, adjusting, and finally sticking that move that felt impossible ten minutes earlier. And because I am obsessed with maximizing my value of something, we both bought our own harnesses and shoes, paid into the monthly membership plan and started going three times a week. For months!

Then, spring of 2020 happened. The gym shut down. We moved, had a baby. The membership lapsed. We’ve never made it back, even though it’s one of those activities we both agree we genuinely loved. Fast-forward to January 2026. My five-year-old daughter has just started bouldering. We sign her up for a climbing class, and suddenly I’m spending three days a week back in that chalk-dusted environment, watching people try a problem over and over again. And just like that, the itch is back. I miss that carnal feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of strength of pushing my body past previous limits.

So imagine my surprise when I boot up my Steam Deck and saw that someone in my Steam Family has purchased Cairn. I’d heard nothing about it, but I saw it had strong reviews (I’m pretty good at dodging video game media).

A climbing game? Sure. Why not. What have I got to lose?

Cairn casts you as expert mountaineer Aava attempting to summit Mount Kami, the most dangerous mountain in the world. If you take the time to explore the posters in the tutorial area, you’ll learn that around 30 people attempt the climb each year. Few ever return. None have ever reached the summit.

Past the tutorial area, the game begins simply. You’re on the mountain, starting your ascent. Better get climbing.

The climbing system initially defaults to an automatic limb-selection mechanic. You move hands and feet individually with the left thumb stick. Up, sideways, diagonally, everywhere you’d think your limbs can go. While the game automatically suggests which limb should move next, it’s tactile, deliberate, and slow. You don’t just “hold forward to climb.” You’re supposed to think through every placement. Just planting your foot against a smooth rock and counting on your smear to hold is going to result in a bad time.

Also, Aava is absurdly flexible. At one point I had her hooking a foot somewhere near her own ear to gain leverage. As I often tell my daughter, video games are not real.

But this system is also where my first major frustration surfaced. Sometimes the “obvious” move like adjusting the bottom-left foot as I’m moving to the left, wasn’t the move the game wanted. Instead, it would shift the bottom-right foot, which then I couldn’t even see behind Aava’s back. Suddenly her leg is dragging across her body, toes reaching where her hands should be, and she’s clinging to the wall by fingertips, and I’m scrambling to fix a problem I didn’t mean to create.

More than one fall happened that way.

On most difficulty levels, you can place pitons into the rock to act as checkpoints. If you fall, you’re hauled back up to your last placed piton. They’re limited, though. If you misuse them or fall too often, you’ll need to collect scraps to forge new ones. and Falling in Cairn stings. Not just because you failed, but because of the time and resources that are lost.

Cairn is a slow game. A tricky problem can take 5–10 minutes to work through. Sometimes 20. One time, 25. And inevitably, you’ll be right at the end of a brutal stretch, one final foothold between you and a cave or hidden discovery… and then Aava’s foot slips. You scramble. You panic. You fall.

Aava’s voice actress has a couple of great screams and curses that I feel in my soul when this happens. If you haven’t placed a piton recently, then you’re falling the way down until your rag-doll body stops rolling. If you’re lucky, you’ll just die and restart from the last save. Otherwise, you now need to climb out of whatever crevice Aava’s body just fell into. And when you get back to solid ground and look up at that climb that you just failed at, you have to ask yourself if you really want to try it again. Spend another 20 minutes scampering up that wall and face the risk of falling again. And when you’re low on food, low on water, freezing, and exhausted, that lost time also means lost resources.

I don’t think Cairn intentionally wastes your time, not like other games that make you backtrack unnecessarily or have runs ruined by randomness. Cairn demands time through the slow, methodical, and purposeful gameplay. It’s the kind of game that every step is slow, but you’re always progressing. You focus on only the next hand or foot hold, and after a few minutes, you’ll pan your camera around and be a little breathless at how far you’ve gone.

That being said, when you finally conquer that tricky section? When you stick the move that previously sent you plummeting? It’s absolutely euphoric. The dopamine rush is so real. It mirrors real-world climbing in a way I did not expect from a video game.

Cairn isn’t just a game about limb placement. It’s also about survival. You’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst, warmth, and stamina. You’ll need to shake your pack to cram as many supplies as possible in, as you scavenge abandoned backpacks, derelict cable cars, and broken vending machines. The real treat is when you come cross a delicious egg in a nest during a climb. The survival mechanics and lack of a firm restocking point creates a tension that triggers my hoarding psychology.

I have “Final Fantasy Elixir Syndrome.” I never use the rare, powerful items because what if I need them later? So I end most games with a stack of elixirs and a pile of regret. Cairn pokes that exact nerve. You don’t want to use your good food. What if there’s something worse ahead? What if there’s no food beyond this point? But if you don’t use your best foods and benefit from the stat boosts they give you, you might fail the next section

And that brings me back to the fall. If you fall and have to climb again, all that food and water you consumed is just… gone. You’re no further up the mountain than when you started, but you have less resources to get you to the next checkpoint.

It’s brutal. It’s effective. It feels bad. But that bad feeling is clearly intentional design.

The HUD (heads up display) is wonderfully immersive. Your survival meters fade away unless they demand attention. Most of the time, it’s just you and the mountain. As you climb higher, you’ll discover remnants of those who came before you. Abandoned infrastructure, old campsites, backpacks from climbers who never returned, and most interestingly, artifacts and stories from the troglodytes, a group of people who once lived on Mount Kami.

Your only consistent companion is a small robot called a Climbot, a boxy robot on four spider-esque legs that skitter along the rocks, carrying your ropes and retrieving your pitons. Occasionally, Climbot will receive voicemail messages from her manager gently asking how her progress is going, or her partnerchecking in, seeing if she’s okay on her death hike. Aava’s responses to those messages can vary from indifferent to abrasive or dismissive. She resents the distraction. How dare they interrupt her focus while she attempts something this monumental?

Early on, you meet Marco, another mountaineer. He climbs for the love of climbing. He doesn’t believe he’ll reach the summit, but he’s just here for the good times. Aava tears into Marco for that mindset. Calls him defeated. Weak. It’s one of the first times she really speaks, and it’s not flattering. Aava does soften slightly over time, but so much of her characterization left a sour taste in my mouth. I understand she’s undertaking something life-threatening. I understand obsession. But her abrasiveness made it hard for me to enjoy her company.

Near the summit, you encounter another climber who has lived on the mountain for twelve years. He’s too close to the summit to turn back, but he’s unable to reach the top. He shows you dozens upon dozens of backpacks from those who tried and failed. a graveyard. Here, Marco decides he’s done. He’s going back down. Then the game asks you to choose. Do you descend with Marco? Or do you continue your ascent, despite every warning?

On my first play through, I went down. The reward for choosing that is a quiet montage of descent. Marco gives Aava a ride home in his van. The final scene shows her sitting on her bed, staring into space. Disappointed, but alive. Her partner calls out that friends are coming over. Marco is on his way.

This ending felt human. Bittersweet. Real.

On my second play through, I chose to go up. Shortly after that decision, An avalanche crashed on your head, and reduces your survival meters to a third of what they once were. You claw your way through the final ascent, which, surprisingly, isn’t dramatically harder than what came before. On the final wall, Climbot succumbs to the elements. For his mechanical failure, Aava beats it with her climbing picks, berating it for failing her. You can choose to drag it along anyway, or cut it loose. The choice here, doesn’t matter.

Then, Aava reaches her summit. She trudges through the snow cap, to the highest point of mount Kami. There is nowhere else to climb. She screams, a visceral, guttural howl. Then, she sits down in the snow, quiet. Finally, she reaches toward the stars, grabs them, and climbs into the sky.

Some players will find transcendence there. The culmination of obsession. The ultimate accomplishment. But for me, it felt unsatisfying. There is no joy in the accomplishment, no one to share your victory with. Just a tired woman sitting quietly on all she’s conquered. Maybe she dies there, and maybe she heads back down. The ending is poetically ambiguous, to me, it felt like descending with Marco was the good ending, and reaching the summit was the bad one.

Cairn will not win my Game of the Year.

But it was a cathartic, memorable experience, especially given where I am in life right now. It gave me an echo of the real-world climbing rush I’ve been missing since 2020.

The first ascent in Cairn is magical because of the discovery. Peaking your head into a cave to find an indestructible piton, or an angry bear gave me such rushes of excitement. Subsequent climbs lose some of that magic. Now, you know where the food is. You know the shortcuts. You know which caves you should explore, and which you can skip. The mystery fades.

Still, finishing Cairn felt like a real accomplishment.

I wouldn’t want every game to use this limb-by-limb climbing system. I cannot imagine playing Breath of the Wild or Assassin’s Creed, and having to individually manage my feet every time I try to scale a hill.

But for a game wholly committed to simulating mountaineering, Cairn does something special. It captured the frustration. It captured the obsession. It captured the fall.

But most importantly, It captured the feeling that climbing gives you. It reminded me why I got obsessed with it in the first place in 2019. And any game that manages to evoke strong feelings, is a special one indeed.