Jusant mini-review: Dontnod’s loftiest adventure | Kaser Focus

venturebeat.com:

2023 has undoubtedly been a year of big games — beautiful games, ambitious games, games with so much depth and complexity that they can keep players satisfied for months. However, not every game needs to be that: Sometimes a game just needs to do one thing perfectly, or offer a short-but-enjoyable experience in order to be memorable. Jusant, Don’t Nod’s new mountain-climbing adventure game, does both, so I thought I’d give it a little mini-look for this week’s column.

In Jusant, you play as a small, unnamed protagonist who climbs — climbs pretty much anything. The game’s environments are comprised of sheer cliff faces dotted with climbing holds, which the protagonist clambers up with dexterity that would make an Assassin’s Creed hero blush. The game’s mechanics are brilliant in their simplicity — you use two buttons to control the protagonists arms (shoulder buttons on the controller; mouse buttons on the PC) and hold and release them to hold and release their grip. It gives movement this fluidity I haven’t felt in a game in a long time.

The story is also interesting, even if it’s told in that indie game fashion where the protagonist never speaks and must piece together the lore of the world through context clues and discarded scraps of paper. The protagonist is walking through what’s left of an abandoned civilization, and the explanation for why they’re climbing and what they hope to achieve is something the player is just going to have to wait to discover along the way. Overall, it’s a delightful, charming adventure game that does one thing very, very well — and that’s worth just as much, if not more to me than a game that tries to do everything with middling results.

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