TL;DR – An enjoyable single-player experience that comes alive with a group.

Disclosure – I paid for this game.

Peak Review –

One of the events I find fascinating is Game Jams. These are where developers set themselves a short period, usually a day or two, to see what they can build in that time. Here, time forces you to be creative and many weird and wonderful games, from Goat Simulator to Thomas Was Alone and everything in between, have been spawned. Usually, game jams spawn ideas that later become something grand. Still, I have never seen a game conceptualised in February and then released in June before, which is what we will examine today.

So, to set the scene, you are just a happy little guy going on a flight to a new tropical destination on Bingbong Airlines. But disaster strikes, and your plane crashes into an unknown tropical island. What do you do? Well, Scoutmaster Myers’ Wilderness Handbook Vol. 1 advises in How Not to Die, to run, not walk, and “You’ve gotta get to High Ground”. Looking around, you see a high peak in the distance, so it is time to collect supplies, gird your lions, and start climbing.

The main currency in this game is stamina, which makes sense for an experience based on climbing. But you want as much stamina as you can get, but the world is constantly finding new ways to deplete it, through hunger, sleepiness, and the many, many things that can poison you. As you progress through the different levels, additional factors, such as temperature, also come into play. There are times when you can see the way out of your predicament, but because you didn’t store that Red Chrispberry, you have too much hunger to reach it. However, you didn’t store it because everything you carry is weight, and how much you carry also limits the amount of stamina you can have. It’s an interesting system that you’re always riding this fine line throughout the game. The drive to climb as fast as you can, but then not accidentally over-extending yourself.

There are a lot of climbing games out there that span from pure simulation to arcade games, and I would say that PEAK comfortably fits somewhere in the middle. You have to manage a lot of different factors, such as stamina, but you are not looking for an individual handhold because you can simply walk up to a surface and start climbing. All of that flows very naturally as you tend to intuit most of the aspects of the game, like rickety wooden bridges are great for getting across divides, but you should not linger on them for too long. Or energy drinks are going to give you a big boost, but makes you sleepy afterwards. However, for someone like me, who plays on PC with a mouse and keyboard, some of the controls are profoundly fiddly. One such example is that every moment you have to try to use the backpack.

I had fun playing this game by myself, working through its many challenges, such as finding out the hard way what it meant when the fog rolled in. Or the joy of figuring out how to access the luggage and finding it contained the bandages you desperately needed. Or the fun of seeing some coconuts and climbing up the tree to get them. However, while it is interesting as a single-player experience, it comes alive when you play as a group. With more people, it feels like there are fewer resources to go around. However, you also have a team that can help each other climb. Give you that boost you need or throw out a helpful hand to get you up over that final ledge. It is a game that absolutely encourages working together for the common good and punishes you for going it out alone. I cannot explain the joy of rescuing a fallen comrade from a deep crevasse on your last sliver of stamina.

When working as a team, the game uses localised audio, which I found worked very well, and if you do die, you can haunt your friends as a ghost until you all die, or someone makes it to the campfire at the end of a zone, and that was a nice touch. From what I’ve seen, there are four different zones as you climb the titular peak. I haven’t made it above the tropics myself, because I just don’t think I am as good as you need to be in this game. But have enjoyed the shenanigans of my friends’ escapades into the alpine and final layer. Because the island is reset and remade each day, there is always a drive to return to conquer a new challenge, or a ticking clock to try and complete the last one. But because it is my understanding that it is procedurally generated, there are a couple of rough edges here and there. I, for one, came across a bug that hard-crashed me out of the game.

In the end, do we recommend PEAK? As a good guide for what to do in this situation in real life, absolutely not; stay with the plane if it is safe to do so. But as a video game, absolutely. It’s a fun experience where you and some friends can jump on and challenge your way up a mountain, feeling like you’re working as a team.                          

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you played Peak?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 

Credits – All images were created by the staff of Peak
Created by – Galen Drew, Caelan Rashby-Pollock, Petter Henriksson, Wilhelm Nylund, Nick Kaman, Zorro Svärdendahl & Eric Skog
Developer – Aggro Crab & Landfall Games
Publisher – Aggro Crab & Landfall Games