Gaming: Latest Cairn Review
A brilliant climbing adventure that siphons the rage out of navigation puzzlers like Death Stranding and Baby Steps, resulting in something prickly, but warmly approachable.
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What is it? A limb-by-limb climbing sim that reaches dizzying heightsRelease date January 30, 2026Expect to pay TBCDeveloper The Game BakersPublisher The Game BakersReviewed on RTX 3060 (laptop), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAMSteam Deck VerifiedLink Steam
Cairn can be loosely categorised with modern on-foot navigation games like Death Stranding and Baby Steps, but once it clicks, it's more fun to play than either of those. Protagonist Aava is a renown mountain climber with a formidable reputation and reclusive spirit. We meet her at the foot of Mount Kami: an impossibly lofty summit once home to a society of troglodytes with a preference for living vertically. It's her self-assigned mission to be the first to surmount it. What follows is a 15 hour odyssey, or a potentially endless one, about the excruciatingly careful placement of hands and feet on vertical surfaces. It feels grander in scope than anything I've played in recent memory, and it's among the best videogames I've played in years.
The climbing feels unrefined at first, because I've never climbed like this in a game before. Moving one of Aava's limbs is as simple as pressing A, moving it with the analog stick, and then tapping A again for her to affix that limb to the surface. The game automatically selects which limb will move next according to whichever is bearing the most weight, and this can feel counterintuitive at first, near unmanageable, but the logic clicks well before the title card appears. It's possible to choose limbs manually, but this functionality is hidden in the gameplay menu: it's basically nightmare mode and newcomers should avoid it.
Most sensible routes along the rock faces have pockmarks or narrow shelves, but naturally they're rarely placed exactly where you need them, which feeds into a diegetic stamina system communicated by Aava's increasingly shaking limbs, the severity of her breathing, the blurring of the screen, and—if you have a controller with rumble—the vibrations in your hand. Sometimes there's no avoiding a risky scramble, but you'll need to pull it off quickly. It's possible to rest a loadbearin
Source: PC Gamer
