10. Jusant, dev. Don't Nod
A couple years ago I bought a PlayStation 5. And this hypermodern feat of ripping digital muscle and suggestive curves came packaged with a simple little platformer game called Astro's Playroom. To this day, I think Astro's Playroom might still be the best PS5 game I've ever played. (Though we have stiff competition coming later on this list.) Playroom was just a delightful, Nintendo-esque adventure of little robot guys and fun twists on the PS5 controller's various gimmicks - none of which any other game has taken much advantage of so far. One of the best parts of that game was a climbing minigame using the shoulder buttons, where you became a monkey and used the triggers to grab holds and swing around. Each press of the shoulder button was like gripping a part of the course with your hand. It was a ton of fun, really tactile in a way that the abstraction of traditional game controls are not.
Jusant is basically that one minigame but made an entire adventure. It is also very French. That 'T' in the title is probably silent.
Climbing sections are nothing new in video games. The Uncharted series made them an enormous focus, to the point they created something of a backlash. A lot of people found the non-challenge of Nathan Drake shimmying his way around cliffs to be pointless - you really cannot lose doing it after all. Personally, I loved those sections. I enjoyed the mild gameplay that filled in the various conversations. Even if the gameplay was trivial, there was a soothing quality to it. Meanwhile, I never much loved the big blockbuster set piece shooting in any of those games. Jusant has no enemies at all, it is just climbing. You cannot even die in this thing. Your climbing rope has infinite tensile strength and can never snap. No matter how badly you fuck up, you cannot fall to your doom. If you do hit the deck hard, it is no big deal, no health bar. Your little guy has immense upper body strength and only needs a brief rest to rebuild his stamina.
Jusant's plot is typical indie adventure game stuff. You're a small little guy in a big abandoned world, slowly exploring your way up the mountain through the ruins of a lost civilization. It reminds me of Rime, or everything Team Ico has ever made. There's something about dead worlds that fits so well to game design, we keep coming back to this place over and over, like a recurring dream. Your nameless little guy is carrying with him an even smaller little guy, this tiny blob creature. Together you and your blob are helping reawaken life in the barren wastes of these long-dead towns.
"Jusant" means "low tide" in French, which is a surprisingly nautical phrase for a game set in a vast, mostly lifeless desert. While you explore the empty homes, you'll see most of these people had a very coastal view of the world. They lived with canals, docks, water mills. And then one day, all of it dried up. Nothing is left alive but some grasses and little crawly bugs, both of whom make for useful grips while climbing. Your little blob can summon brief bursts of life, creating vine tentacles or brief blossomings of plant grips to carry you forward. You can find plenty of documents describing the adventures of people towards the end times, as they went on the same journey you did, hoping for some great solution to the endless drought. They never found one.
Climate change is something I deal with mostly by trying not to think about it these days. The concept of whole regions of the world becoming unlivable very quickly is increasingly less farfetched. That could be extremely grim, indeed, it is grim. But Jusant is mostly pleasant. You're going on a nice hike across a relatively short game. I like hiking, I like a good rock scramble. What else can you do in the face of oblivion except get some exercise in?
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