[The tension of the rope holds me like a lover, resting on arms and legs that are screaming from the climb up the sheer rock face. Just above me, the last pitons creak, anchoring my weight to the world against gravity's will. A salt wind stings my cheeks as it blows up from what was once a vast ocean floor. I have never felt safer than I do now.

This is Jusant and it is sublime. It's a great rock climbing game with easy to understand mechanics (pun intended), a forgiving stamina system, no cumbersome skill trees or item durability, and a compelling story that gently weaves your journey through environmental storytelling and discovery. While not a completely perfect experience, its meditative simplicity and clean presentation make Jusant a standout game in a year of impressive releases.

Jusant is primarily a climbing game, with some elements reminiscent of 2015's Grow Home, but it also shares conceptual DNA with games like The Pathless, Abzu, and Journey, which focus on exploration in a mysterious, broken world. They share the same. You play a young mountaineer carrying a young "ballast," a flying whale-like creature with the power to restore water to a wasteland dehydrated by a strange, possibly astronomical phenomenon called "Jusanto." (Climbing the vertical cliffs that make up 90% of the mysterious tower at the center of the game world, the climber encounters the last remnants of the various civilizations that inhabited the land before Jusanto.

The climbing itself is simple: use the lower shoulder buttons on the controller (recommended by the game) to climb and hold onto the vertical surface, and the upper shoulder buttons to reel in and out of the rope. The left face button places the pitons and the right face button removes them. The game teaches all this quickly and easily in the early levels, but the real challenge begins then.

Fortunately, Jusanto is not interested in making players bang their heads against a particular section of the tower. This is because every action, from reaching for the next object that can be grabbed to jumping up the cliff, drains the climber's stamina. However, when stamina reaches zero, the carabiner simply returns to the last place it was secured. Climbers can regain lost stamina by resting at each point of the climb, and they can use the three pitons to create subsequent anchor points, like miniature checkpoints. There is no need to worry about fall damage, so you can always focus on climbing. Coupled with Ballast's ability to grow climbable plants and find the next target, one gets the sense that Jusanto wants the climb to be challenging and hopefully enjoyable along the way.

In Jusanto, many mysteries await you right from the start of your journey. Some of them are fundamental. What is the ballast? What are we doing here? And some are more complex and don't necessarily have satisfactory answers: what is Jusanto? What is this huge tower I am supposed to climb? Who or what built it? What am I doing here?" You may immediately try to scour the environment for answers, but the game has other plans. It simply wants you to climb. The answers will reveal themselves the more you climb.

Most of what I learn about each area of the tower comes from letters detailing the daily lives and usual hopes and fears of the people who once lived here. Imagining the sounds of people's lives from the scattered shells, completing the unfinished cairns I find in one area honors a bygone civilization, and each new piece of wall art I encounter deepens my understanding of the importance of ballast. Bianca's journal entry was written by another young climber on the first level of the tower, who took part in the final expedition to the summit. Through her, I mirror my own journey. How will I make the choices she did not make?

Consisting of six chapters and moving through each of the tower's four levels, each with its own real-world architectural references and environmental challenges, Jusant does not last long as an experience. What may linger are the questions and possible futures that the game poses. The game leaves much room for interpretation, and while there are letters and logs to collect, they define a breakdown in communication and loss of knowledge and history rather than concrete answers. Notes written to friends and family that remain unanswered, diaries describing the evacuation, newspapers going out of business ....... Will we succeed? Happy Climbing.

.