Idle Thoughts

A magnificent premise for a game that sadly doesn’t reach the heights it could have (★★★☆☆)

Man, I really wanted to like Insurmountable.

I have an immense amount of respect for developers who try to make games without any combat or violence. It’s especially unusual for a roguelike.

Here, it’s just you against the mountain.

As expected for the genre, you manage your resources, keep ‘em as high as possible, maybe trade one for another. It’s a plate-spinning game. You basically have four bars to keep track of. Energy is your stamina. It’s both the easiest resource to spend (through physical exertion) and the easiest to regain (through rest). Warmth is body temperature. You lose it by spending too much time exposed to the elements, especially at night and when sleeping. Oxygen is a non-issue until you reach 6000m, then it becomes the fastest draining resource without any permanent way to regain it except going back down. Sanity is the odd one. It ticks down very slowly and is affected by events positively and negatively, but once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get back up.

Health is the final resource. It mostly only goes down when another resource is empty. When that happens, you are harassed by life-threatening events every few steps. That part is inspired. It makes the act of dying harrowingly gradual. The description of these random events also helps set the mood. But, on the brighter side, you might have juuust enough time to limp to your goal and survive. It’s not over until it’s over.

The important part of Insurmountable is that getting to the top is not enough: you also have to get back down to safety. I hope you kept some strength for the way back. This is such a crucial aspect of mountaineering and they got that part right. A much lesser game would just let you “win” at the top and leave it at that.

So the concept of the game is pretty great. Sadly, the game is otherwise bogged down by a series of weird decisions.

First of all, the game added a story and a larger roguelike structure in its last PC update. It now has some loopy plot about well, time loops and magic crystals and such. Kind of like the TV series Lost (there’s even a hatch somewhere in there). At least the concept is a good excuse to have all kinds of random strange events happen to the player.

But gosh, if there ever was a roguelike that didn’t need any story, it’s Insurmountable.

There’s you. There’s the mountain. Get to it. Presumably something happens when you get on top of the big rock, I’m not sure. Choose whichever reason that compels people to climb mountains. Fame? Hot girls? Enlightenment? Self-worth? The fleeting feeling of being literally and figuratively on top of the world? Or just because it’s there? Just keep climbing until you find what you’re looking for. Or die, whichever comes first.

It’s Man against its own hubris. Man against himself, really. Pure. Simple.

The goofy story even undercuts one of the basic elements of the game. If some kind of magic time loop always brings me back to base after a while, even if I die, why bother with the climb back down at all?

In many ways, the game seems unfinished. It’s trite to say that something is a “labor of love”, but here it seems like some of that love is missing. For example, I’ve found a single “charm” type item in two complete runs of the game, despite Insurmountable giving you two slots for those. If you “beat” the game, your save file gets wiped and you’re booted back to the main menu. You get a final score, but the game doesn’t even care enough to store it anywhere, never mind having a global leaderboard. Since your save file gets wiped, there’s a whole part of the metaprogression track that will probably remain unused. Why not just let me keep going on missions? Isn’t that the whole point of a roguelike?

I’ve had a single game crash, which normally doesn’t even warrant a mention, but here the game considers a crash as a death, possibly wiping your save in the process. Not cool.

The camera is quite awful. I understand why the camera is always centered on the player: it adds to the sense of isolation and finally getting a 360° panoramic view is a nice little bonus you get for reaching the top. What doesn’t make sense is your view getting obstructed by anything behind your character when trying to look straight ahead. Look, am I seeing things from the perspective of my character or am I getting a bird’s-eye view? Pick a lane. Being able to see where you’re going is literally a matter of life and death. You don’t have resources to waste on detours since moving efficiently is the whole point of the game. Worse, impassable hexes are almost impossible to spot compared to regular hexes, so forget figuring out which is which at a distance. In that sense, being able to click on the summit to plot a route there is essential and the camera is often a hindrance when trying to do that.

It’s worth mentioning that the design of the game has nothing to with actual mountaineering, not even in a vaguely board-gamey kind of way. For one, you are oddly limited in what you can bring along. You can either bring an ice axe or warm boots or a tent, but not all three; that kind of deal. You’re expected to scrounge extra equipment on the mountain. You also lose all experience and items after every mountain climb.

The optimal way to play the game is to “save up” all your levels up until you reach 6000m and then unleash them all so that for 24 hours running straight up the mountain costs zero energy. I mean, I’m not Alex Honnold, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how mountain climbing works. I’m intrigued by the fact that the game offers temporary buffs on level up, but in practice the permanent buffs are so awful it’s always better to take the short term help.

The optimal playstyle also avoids most events, since those are often a waste of time and make you risk your neck for a (potential) marginal bonus. This makes real life sense, but it’s not very interesting game design.

They could have gone for a more conventional and logical framework: choose a character, climb a mountain, amass xp and items, then spend some kind of currency on your return to base. Most importantly, you keep your items and levels between climbs. Rinse and repeat with higher and more dangerous mountains until you die or beat the final “boss” mountain.

It seems to me like one of the fundamental aspects of mountaineering is picking the right tools for the job and weighing their usefulness against their actual weight. That’s practically a video game right there! Why isn’t any of this in Insurmountable? Let me overpack to my own doom damn it!

You could also make the game’s currency “fame”: easy climbs get you a trickle of it, so you reach for harder and harder goals to get ever more of it. You could increase your “fame” bonus by giving yourself handicaps, like free solo climbing, climbing without oxygen tanks or something like that. This goes on until you gauge the risk/reward potential wrong and you die. That’s also very videogamey, and darkly poetic. In the words of some other game: “overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.”

I’m bummed that Insurmountable didn’t turn out to be the mountaineering roguelike I expected. The one it could have been. I admire its clarity of purpose nonetheless. You can start a new run at the bottom of the mountain and point to its summit. A glowing line forms to guide you. I’m down here. I should be way up there. Let’s go.