Once upon a time, I was learning about the difference between lived experiences and observed experiences. The teacher split the class in half. One group sat back and recorded what they saw, while the other group had to run up a staircase, breathing only through a straw. Then the class switched roles.
Unsurprisingly, the observers didn’t quite grasp how difficult the task really was until they experienced it themselves. And that lesson came back to me when I sat down to play Tearable Quest, designed by Shintaro Ono, with art by Sai Beppu, and published by Allplay in 2025.
Because on the surface, Tearable Quest looks like nothing. You get a sheet of paper absolutely littered with icons like swords, spells, slimes, goblins, bows, and so on. Your job is to rip out only the icons you need to score points. Each round introduces a different monster with specific scoring requirements, alongside a boss card that’s always available to be tackled, tied to its own icons. Over three two minute rounds, you’re trying to earn the most points by carefully tearing out exactly what you need to match those recipes.
And I do mean exactly.
You can’t have extra icons present in your piece. You can’t have half an icon. It has to be a clean, precise tear of only what’s required. Which sounds easy until you actually try it. The timer starts, you identify what the recipe is, then look down at the sheet. The paper is cluttered, the icons you want are never conveniently grouped together, so you end up carving these awkward zig-zag paths through the paper, trying to isolate just the right pieces without ruining everything around them. To make matters worse, if you flip the sheet over you’ll find treasures that boost your score and curses that bring it back down, adding another layer of consideration to every rip.
Now, Tearable Quest is not just about precision, it’s about speed. You’ll be halfway through a tear, trying to grab one more icon for maximum points, and suddenly you realize there are only a few seconds left. Do you commit to your rip and risk everything, or do you play it safe and just lock in what you have? That tension, that split-second decision-making, is where my heart started to flutter and a smile crossed my face.
And all of this ripping and tearing is happening on a single sheet of paper that has to last you all three rounds. If you go too hard too early, you’ll massacre your page, and you might not have anything usable left in the later rounds. But if you’re too cautious, you fall behind. It creates this surprisingly compelling push and pull between greed and restraint that I wasn’t expecting at all.
That’s where the lived experience hits. From the outside, Tearable Quest looks like a throwaway gimmick. Ripping paper as a game mechanic sounds more like a novelty than something you’d actually want to play. But once you’re in it and the clock is ticking and your hands fumble as you try to make clean, efficient tears, you start to notice how awkwardly fun the game is. You’ll curse how big your thumbs feel. How unpredictable ripping paper can be. How badly you want just one more icon before that timer runs out. You’ll feel jubilant that you managed to complete your rip before the timer runs out, but you’ll flip the paper over and find 2 curses, rendering your score nil. Oh, the hubris…
The art plays a big role in selling the experience. Sai Beppu’s illustrations are bright, cartoonish, and disarming in a way that makes the whole thing feel playful rather than ridiculous. You’re still an adult sitting there gleefully ripping up paper, but the game leans into that energy instead of fighting it, and it works wonderfully.
There isn’t a huge amount of variety here. There are two different sheets to play with, four different monsters (you’ll use 3 during each game), and half a dozen bosses. There are some bonus cards to mix things up, but the core experience doesn’t really change. You’re always doing the same thing, ripping, optimizing, and hoping you’ve left yourself enough icons to work with for the next round. It’s always a bit frantic, certainly a bit messy, and very consistent in the experience that it offers.
That consistency is part of its charm. It’s light, it’s quick, and it never feels like too much. You’re not going to build a whole game night around Tearable Quest, but it’s really easy to fit into the beginning or end of one. Because it’s so light and fast, It’s the kind of game you’re almost never going to refuse, even if you’ve already played it a few times.
Tearable quest is charming and genuinely unique. I can’t think of anything else that turns ripping up a piece of paper into the main event and actually makes it fun. And honestly, it doesn’t really need to be anything more than that.
Disclaimer – A copy of 3 Witches was provided by the designer
One of the things I love about trick-taking games is how effortlessly they get to the table. You generally get a deck of cards and deal most if not all the cards out. The teach is usually something along the lines of “It’s a trick-taking game, but here’s the twist…” and you’re off. The bones of trick-taking games are familiar: follow suit, win tricks, claim victory. Sure, each game brings its own little wrinkles that make each one unique and interesting, but the foundations of the games are usually comforting and intuitive.
3 Witches is not that game.
Or rather, it eventually is. But before you can enjoy the clever little mind games, you need to wrap your head around a teach that feels less like “here’s the twist” and more like “Let me read to you this complex spell from a potion making textbook”
To begin a round of 3 Witches, shuffle the 18-card deck and deal all the cards evenly to three players. Everyone checks their hand and whomever is holding the Elixir card declares that fact. That player doesn’t automatically control the round, though. In fact, they’re now the last player to bid.
Starting with the player to the left of the Elixir holder, they have the option to bid or pass. When it comes to bidding, a player can bid to win either 3 or 4 tricks. If they bid 3 tricks, the subsequent players have an opportunity to bid 4 and take control of the lead position, or pass. Any player who bids 4 tricks automatically ends the bidding round.
Whoever wins the bid becomes the Lead Witch for the round. The other two players form a temporary alliance as the Lesser Witches. The Lead Witch places the bid card in front of them to signify their role. And then the wyrdness begins.
Each trick in 3 Witches is played in a very particular order:
The Lead Witch plays two cards:
One face up (this establishes the lead suit)
One face down (kept secret for now)
The first Lesser Witch must follow suit if able.
If they cannot follow suit, they pass for the moment.
The second Lesser Witch plays a card (following suit if possible).
If the first Lesser Witch had to pass earlier, they now play a card.
The Lead Witch reveals their face-down card.
Now the trick is resolved, but not quite in the usual way. Winning the trick isn’t simply about playing the highest card of the lead suit. 3 Witches uses a small value formula involving the combination of cards played. For example, if two cards of the same suit are involved, they combine their values. The same happens if the two cards played are the same value. If the two cards played are different suits and different numbers, then only the highest value of those cards counts toward determining the winner. Compare the final values, and whoever is higher wins the trick. Also the Lead Witch always wins ties.
It’s clever. It’s quite unintuitive. And the first time you play, everyone will be absolutely glued to their player aids.
After a trick is resolved, the winner gets a bit of control over the tempo of the round.
If the Lesser Witches win the trick, they return one of the Lead Witch’s cards to the Lead Witch’s hand.
If the Lead Witch wins, they secretly choose one of the two cards they played and return it to their hand face down.
That’s right, the Lead Witches cards cycle back. This mechanism gives 3 Witches its delicious tension. Every trick is not only about winning or losing; it’s about which card you want to reclaim and how that will influence the remaining tricks.
Each round lasts for exactly five tricks, then scoring happens. If the Lead Witch makes their bid exactly (the three or four tricks they called, absolutely no more and no less), then they score 2 points. If the Lead Witch misses their bid, each of the lesser witches score 1 point each.
Then, shuffle, redeal, and start the bidding phase again. The game continues until one player hits 5 points, at which point the coven crowns its leader.
3 Witches is a game of temporary alliances and working together to control the narrative. Because each round is only 5 tricks, and the Lead Witch needs to win 3 or 4 of those tricks, the lesser witches need to work together to force the Lead Witch into losing, or, winning too hard.
I know some people find the phrase “knife fight in a phone booth” to be a cliché and overused way to describe close quarters conflict. So instead, I’ll say that 3 Witches is a fistfight in an elevator. At 18 cards, it’s much easier to count cards and deduce information based on what the other two players have already played. More than once during my plays I was able to path out exactly how I could win a round as a Lead Witch, if, and only if, two specific cards were in the same hand.
There’s a ton of smart design in 3 Witches. From the minute 18 card deck that really encourages players to count cards, to having 5 suits with 3 to 4 cards each, to the player with the elixir being the last one to bid, so much of the game design and rules shows that there has been a lot of thought put into every aspect of this small card game. Everything is so finite, so considered, it’s really an impressive showcase of design work by Corey Young.
Contributing to that “wrestling match in a broom closet” feeling is the fact that each round is only five tricks long. The moment the first trick hits the table and cards start revealing themselves, you can feel the decision space tighten. Your options constrict. Unsettling certainty creeps in. As the Lead Witch, you might struggle to lose even a single trick. At the start of a round you might feel chuffed holding two 5s, but the moment you accidentally scoop a trick you were trying to duck, the panic sets in. Suddenly you’re not trying to win, you’re trying to win precisely.
And that’s where 3 Witches feels most exciting.
The 18-card deck means information moves fast. With so few cards in circulation, you can count, deduce, and sometimes even map out the exact path to victory. More than once I’ve sat there as the Lead Witch thinking, This works… but only if those two specific cards are in the same hand. It becomes much less about hoping and more about calculating.
There’s a ton of smart design packed into this tiny box. Five suits with only three or four cards each. The Elixir holder bidding last. The cycling card mechanism that prevents clean attrition. Everything feels deliberate. Considered. Tight. It’s an impressive showcase of design work by Corey Young. The production by AllPlay is svelte too. A tiny box of cards and 12 cardboard chits makes 3 Witches a game that feels far bigger than its footprint.
I also love how dynamic the table politics feel. The Lead Witch changes every round, which keeps the semi-cooperative tension fresh. Winning as a Lesser Witch feels easier, but in doing so you’re handing a point to a rival. Taking the Lead Witch role is thrilling because you can leap ahead with two points. But if you fail, both of your opponents inch closer to their victory. Every bid feels loaded. Every trick feels consequential.
I really appreciate 3 Witches. I love how sharp it feels, how finite and intentional every decision is. It’s not an effortless teach, and I suspect that the strict three-player count will keep it from ever becoming a universal classic. But in the right setting, with those who enjoy kickboxing in a cardboard box, that is to say, counting cards, weaving in and out of tight margins, and that delicious feeling of trying to thread a needle under pressure, 3 Witches absolutely sings.
Perhaps this is a byproduct of playing entirely too many games on Board Game Arena, or maybe I’ve just become more sensitive to it since having kids and watching my sleep health deteriorate entirely, but I hate hidden trackable information in board games.
First, a definition.
Hidden Trackable Information (HTI) refers to information that everyone at the table could be tracking and therefore knows with 100% certainty, but which is deliberately hidden. I’m not talking about drawing cards into your hand in Ticket to Ride, even if you use the public market every turn, because you could still be drawing blindly from the deck, and that information is hidden.
What I mean is something more like Puerto Rico, where scores are completely trackable, but for some reason the scores are told to be hidden. Or For Sale, where you can, and probably should, be tracking how much money each player is paying at each auction, and therefore how much money they have left for future bids, but the rules insist on keeping your bank accounts private.
Here’s my real problem with hidden trackable information: I’m dumb. And I play games with really smart people.
I don’t mind losing because I made tactical errors, or because randomness bit me in the ass. I can handle that just fine. But when I lose because I wasn’t able to keep every piece of data in my head while my opponents were successfully counting cards or tracking points, it feels incredibly discouraging.
A good example is El Grande. Players drop cubes into the castle, and when it’s time to score, the cubes are revealed and whoever has the majority scores the points. I find it deeply frustrating to sit there trying to remember who put cubes in and how many. Should I commit three cubes because I think that puts me into the majority? Should I commit four just to be safe? If I had been writing this down as players added cubes, I’d be able to make an informed decision instead of guessing based on vibes and vibes alone.
As most parents do, I’m going to blame my children.
Over the past five years, my sleep has been constantly interrupted by rugrats. Unfortunately for me, no one else in my game group has kids. They usually show up to game night well rested and emotionally stable, ready for a long game of cold calculations. Meanwhile, I’m crawling in on four hours of sleep because my five-year-old was awake for three hours from 1am to 4am, terrified she was going to swallow her first loose tooth (true story).
Some people have very strong opinions about hidden trackable information. I’m always surprised by the ferocity with which people will defend games that use HTI, and rail against the mere idea of someone using a memory aid or taking notes.
“It makes games so much less enjoyable!” “memory is a skill! That’s part of playing the game!”
In furtherance of me being dumb, playing a lot of board games online has absolutely made my brain lazy. The Yucata version of El Grande shows you exactly what’s in the castle at all times, because, ostensibly, you could be tracking that information yourself. BGA has a notes feature built right into the interface, allowing you to jot things down at any time. Somewhat ironically, I almost never use it, but I’m glad it’s there, especially for those async games that stretch over weeks.
The most common defences of HTI seem to be that it reduces analysis paralysis and prevents king making. If everyone knows exactly who’s winning, the table will pile on the leader. If all information is open, players might spend far more time puzzling out the optimal move instead of trusting their gut and just playing the game. To me, this sounds like the defence of well rested players relying on their more simple compatriots making mistakes to cement their victory.
So where is the line? When is hidden trackable information okay?
Would you allow someone to look through a discard pile to check whether a card had already been played, and they just missed it? Would you allow a player to look into their bag in Orléans or Automobiles to confirm what cubes they even have available to them?
If you let someone shift through their discard pile, would you let them look through the previously played tricks to see if that jack of hearts had already been played? Some games like Cat in the Box are very friendly to players like me, because they include a whole board for everyone to track what cards have already been played.
Now, I will concede that playing El Grande with perfect information makes the reveal much less exciting. Sometimes imperfect information really does create a different, and occasionally better, experience. I’ll also concede that taking this argument to its logical extreme is annoying. I absolutely don’t want to play with someone who’s maintaining a full spreadsheet of which cards have appeared and which ones I’ve drafted while playing Star Realms. As with most things, nuance matters.
Some games only work with HTI. Trio, for instance, should be a simple game of memory, but for some reason it makes me feel like my brain is melting out of my ears. But the game only really shines when players are making mistakes and struggling to remember if they already know what someone’s lowest card is. The ever shifting information of players hands helps facilitate that feeling as well. Similarly, Wandering Towers would be really boring if those towers were clear.
As with all things, context matters. I’m generally pretty against HTI in economic euro games, because the purpose or goal of those games are to be the most efficient, and obscuring some information goes against the spirit of the game. In other, less mathematical games, where the purpose of the game is to evoke specific feelings, then HTI makes sense.
But in my opinion, someone who insists on preserving HTI and then wins because of my poor memory is no better than someone winning a game because their opponent forgot a rule and had a critical turn derailed. I’d much rather win or lose with everyone playing at their best, rather than because someone couldn’t remember how many cubes were dropped into a tower.
All of this said, I’m speaking from a place of privilege. No one at my table suffers from serious analysis paralysis. No one quarterbacks co-op games. No one is deliberately exploiting information asymmetry to bully less confident players. I’m not arguing that HTI is always bad, or that it should be purged from game design entirely.
But I am saying this: if the deciding factor in a strategy game is who remembered better, or who was able to silently run a second game in their head while also playing the first one, then that’s not a test of strategy I find especially compelling anymore.
I want to win or lose because I made better decisions with the information in front of me. I want my mistakes to be tactical, not neurological. When a game rewards someone for tracking numbers in their head while pretending they aren’t there, it doesn’t feel clever to me, it feels exclusionary.
Maybe that’s the sleep deprivation talking. Maybe it’s too many games on BGA. Or maybe it’s just that, at this stage of my life, I’m less interested in proving I can remember how many cubes went into a tower three rounds ago, and more interested in making interesting choices right now. If that means occasionally letting players look into their bag and confirm the information that was available to them all along? I’m fine with that. I’d rather play a game where everyone can see the whole picture, than one where the real contest is who forgot the least.
Disclaimer: This review is based on plays of 7 Wonders Dice on Board Game Arena.
Ah, the roll and write. First comes a successful board game. Then comes the card game version. Then comes the roll and write cash in. 7 Wonders is no different, albeit it’s taken quite a bit longer to get here than some of the other examples I’m referencing, *cough CastlesofBurgundycough*.
In 7 Wonders Dice, you’re competing with your neighbours to earn the most points by managing your resources and utilizing the whims of the dice most effectively. If you’ve played a roll and write before, you’ll recognize the scorepad fairly well. Half a dozen coloured sections for you to scratch off, half a dozen different ways to score, and dozens of tiny symbols that promise synergy and cascading combos, which is my favourite part of a roll and write, if I’m being honest.
The player boards, much like in the full game of 7 Wonders, are slightly asymmetric. Each one is themed around a different wonder, and will offer players different rewards when they progress their wonder. Some of the symbols on the main mat are slightly different too, making different coloured dice more valuable to some players than others.
The dice part of 7 Wonders Dice is the more interesting system. At the top of each round, 7 dice are put into a box, and the box gets shaken, Boggle style. The box is slammed down, the lid lifted, and inside will be the dice sitting in one of the four quadrants. Each player gets to select one die, pay the cost based on which quadrant it’s sitting in, and do the action depicted on the die, paying any resource costs listed on the space they want to action on. Following similar themes from its big brother, the blue are straight points, the yellow focuses on economy, the reds have you competing against your opponents, and the greens give you special abilities.
7 Wonders Dice comes to an end when someone has completed 3 sections of their board, and that may happen sooner than you think. The wonder itself only has 3 stages and can be taken at any time by any dice. The yellow and white sections only have 6 spaces, and that white dice can let you take 2 actions in a specific colour, potentially ending the game faster than you’d think was possible (although you do need to unlock the white, black, and purple dice before you can do any of their actions).
Image Credit: W. Eric Martin @W Eric Martin via BGG
At the core of your decision process is going to be money. Every space costs resources, but you can always buy a resource for 1 dollar. You can spend a turn to earn a resource, giving you a permanent discount of 1 for the rest of the game, but how many turns do you want to burn taking resources? Inevitably, you’ll find yourself a coin short at the most inopportune times. I’m not a big fan of this system, as all 6 of the resources are completely arbitrary. Every resource offers a discount of 1 to every other space, and because this is so powerful, pretty much everyone’s first 3 rounds are going to be just taking resources, which is less than interesting.
Speaking of inopportune timing, you’ll probably also curse the dice a lot. Once you exhaust all the options of a particular dice face, that die face is now useless to you. The yellow die offers 3 spaces for both camels and treasure boxes. If you take that camel 3 times in a row and exhaust that half of the pavilion, any future camels that get rolled are functionally a dead die for you. Conversely, you might be waiting round after round for a specific symbol, only for it to finally show up, but in the 3 coin quadrant and your purse only has 2 coins remaining. Bad luck.
7 Wonders Dice lacks the universal appeal and strategic depth that launched the original to its stardom. It also doesn’t have the endless replayability that makes 7 Wonders Duel a top 10 game for me. I would never say there’s anything wrong with 7 Wonders Dice, it’s a perfectly serviceable roll and write game, but it’s not very interesting on repeat plays. The first time, you’ll be tickled in seeing the familiar icons and systems with a fresh coat of paint and some novel reworkings. But after a couple plays, I never felt like any game was particularly different from the others. I don’t think there is a particularly high skill ceiling, as in most games, you’ll be able to achieve most of each section in each game. It lacks the trade-offs and branching paths of bigger roll and writes, such as Hadrian’s Wall.
I will say that I enjoy 7 Wonders Dice a lot more as an “easier 7 Wonders” than the completely arbitrary 7 Wonders Architects, but that was a very low bar to clear. The simultaneous action selection does make this game flow quickly, letting you knock out a 4 player game in under 20 minutes. Sometimes you’ll earn a bonus that lets you do a bit more on your turn, but those are a far cry from the bombastic cascading turns of something like That’s So Clever or Draft & Write Records.
7 Wonders Dice is an enjoyable, but pretty unremarkable roll and write game at the end of the day. You aren’t building a civilization, drafting cards and watching your empire slowly grow. You’re ticking off boxes, watching your decision space shrink over time. I wouldn’t ever say no to playing it, but I’d be hard-pressed to choose it over either of the first two 7 Wonders games, let alone any other roll and write that I already have sitting in my closet. If you’re new to roll and writes or want a lightweight 7 Wonders appetizer, this game might land for you. But If you already own a few entries in the genre, there’s very little here you haven’t seen before.
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 arelost.
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.
