Tallulah Gorge State Park is maybe the closest I’ve ever been to feeling like I was in a video game. It’s a regular state park, with a gorge available to swim in if you get there early enough to get a permit. But the thing is, the gorge is located deep, deep in the heart of the park. And by park, I mean the middle of the wilderness. Half the path to the gorge is a proper path with handrails, obvious gravel paths to walk along, and clear signs pointing towards the way. The other half begins when you open a gate to cross a running river via a few stones, just like that one scene in Uncharted Golden Abyss. From there, you have to scale alongside rock walls, leap over and under logs and trees, and pull yourself onto boulders to finally reach the almost beach-like clearing of the gorge. The first time I ever took this route, I was hooked on the sense of adventure it gave me. From then on, I kept coming back every year or so with different groups of friends. Well, I haven’t been in quite sometime because not every one of my friends was down for such a strenuous activity. I’ve seen friends get bruised, slightly cut on twigs, and debilitated by the Georgia heat, despite the water I stressed them to bring and the caution I emphasized when traversing. So, until I find a new group to drag up there at 5am (because permits often run out well before noon), then the gorge will remain a memory for now.

Cairn is a climbing game from The Game Bakers, a developer that has consistently made games that always seemed interesting to me. I love a good boss rush game, so Furi has always been on my radar, and I did finally start it up this year. Haven is one of those few games that is not only fully playable in co-op, but is narratively focused on a romantic couple in game. I’ve been saving it to play once I’m a part of one myself, but since the game is playable solo, and I initially had similar plans for It Takes Two before just asking a friend to play with me, perhaps I may get to that sooner rather than later. However, Cairn is maybe the first time I’ve looked forward to playing one of their games before release. I found the initial trailers for it fascinating, loved the demo they dropped a few months ahead of launch, and bought it very close to launch as I was fully swept up in the hype of its positive reviews.

After about 2 hours, it sat in my backlog for about 5 months, only for me to randomly pick back up and become obsessed with it last month until completing it finally.

Cairn is dope for several reasons, but primarily due to its climbing gameplay and how it doesn’t feel like gameplay. I’ve played so many, too many, video games, so I am an expert in the language they speak. But one language I rarely get to utilize in this medium is the language of the body, of physicality. Getting a grip on the right edge, slamming your spiked foot into the right chunk of ice, and setting your body in just the right spot that lets you recover a bit of stamina are all actions expressed solely through Aava’s body movements and moans of strain. The lack of bars and meters showing your stamina or grip strength makes the game feel not only more immersive, but make your connection with both Aava and the mountain feel all the more intimate.

But on top of the presentation of the mechanics being excellent, the core gameplay of climbing the mountain is just fun on its own. I’ve often talked about how many of my favorite games of all time are ones in which movement is fast and fluid. What Cairn has made me realize is that I don’t love games like inFAMOUS 2, Sunset Overdrive, and Titanfall 2 because movement is fast, I love them because movement is constantly an active concern. On top of shooting, or zapping, enemies, I have dedicated a different part of my brain to finding the next grind rail to ride or wall to run on. That constant sense of pressure returns in Cairn, but almost purely through the ordeal of movement. Because I can’t just hold a direction on the left stick to get to where I need to go, every single grip of my hands and contortion of my body is a major decision. The choices even spread into the survival mechanics, which I’ve never really found compelling in other games, but adored here. Not only did I love finding ingredients and discovering how they combine to make new concoctions, but I adored how these foods, drinks, and medicines further enhanced the desperation of a climb. The amount of times I thought I’d die on the side of Mt. Kami only to push through thanks to some oatmeal and a B12 vitamin shot is near endless. I’ve lost half hours of progress just because I’ve disrespected the mountain by underestimating my approach to it and falling to my death. The fact that any hand hold could be the small ember that burns down my entire run made me focus on all of them with the same level of concentration. And it felt incredible to play a game that was able to make me lock in with such a serene vibe.

And that’s another thing, this game is beautiful. As someone who once loved taking out the camera (i.e. opening up Photo Mode) in most single player games I play, I don’t do it as much because I often feel like the wonder of these digital landscapes is overly familiar. I’ve shot so many faces and axed so many druids in impossibly detailed environments that those details don’t really stick out enough for me to get excited about them. But due to the crevices and cracks of each mountain surface being the main building block of gameplay in Cairn, you’re already trained to scan the environments with much more care and curiosity. Every time I found an abandoned cave, school room, or bed room, I scoured the places for not only resources, but notes that told me something about the people who once occupied those spaces. Often, the rooms I’d find myself in were so striking, especially in contrast to the never ending stone of Mount Mt. Kami, that I sat around for several minutes snapping photos of Aava in the fresh surroundings. But even when back outside, the imposing nature of Kami is so overwhelmingly cinematic and grandiose, that certain peaks, bridges, and canyons almost begged me to stop and soak in the sights. Throughout the game, Aava talks about being “one with the mountain”. In these moments where I was left alone with nature, forced to consider my insignificance in the face of its magnitude, I felt like this game elevated from something that spoke to my brain through satisfying gameplay to something that spoke to my soul in ways that only the best art can.

The worst case of exhaustion I’ve witnessed at Tallulah Gorge was the first time I went. After you get to the Tallulah Gorge, the worst of the trip is behind you, but if you wanna get outta there, the journey is far from over. Most of the path back is a long, long, long walk on the clearly marked gravel path one would be used to by then. But before that, there is a steep climb up over several boulders for several dozen feet. This is what really takes people out, especially when they’ve just spent the preceding few hours swimming under the hot sun. On my first visit, one of my friends, Buddha, just could not make it up this wall. That name is a nickname that either he, or those that knew him, chose well before I ever met him in high school. But it’s relevant to explain that he had that name because, well, he looks like the stereotypical image of The Buddha, complete with the belly, smile, and nearly bald buzzcut atop his Cambodian face. So, imagine someone like that doing all of the physical activity I’ve discussed up to this point? Needless to say, he was more than ready to wrap things up and so was everyone else. But as everyone else kept climbing when he needed yet another break to rest, I stayed back with him. After enough time waiting during one of his frequent breaks, I tried motivating him. First, I tried pep talks, then I tried reminding him of the comfort of the car’s AC, and finally, I resorted to playing music. After I ran out of more general motivational ballads, I started playing more…ironic tracks.

I loved so much about Cairn, but I didn’t expect for its narrative to impact me so much. Aava is a character that I can’t say I love wholeheartedly. She is standoffish to strangers, seemingly one small mistake away from blood curdling rage at all times, and ignores the metaphorically outstretched hands of those that seek to maintain or build a connection with her. She kinda sucks, but not everything about her is so off-putting. Her embrace of the mountain is the most endearing thing about her. Her care for the mountain, shown in how she cleans up after other climbers and talks to the mountain like a person, even if often through angry screams, speaks so much to her capacity for patience. Even the way she speaks when encountering the remnants of those that climbed before her, thanking them as she takes supplies from their backpacks, or saying soft goodbyes as she gathers their left behind notes and keepsakes, shows the softness that her prickly, standoffish exterior initially hides from view. Mountain climbing is her true calling, and it seems that she only becomes her true self, the woman she’s destined to be, when she lets herself fade away completely into oneness with Mount Kami. And I think that is beautiful, but this narrative wouldn’t have stuck in my mind if those were the only themes this game tackled. I hope every person can find something in life that brings them the kind of inner peace that mountain climbing brings Aava, but there is a cost when that something begins to consume you.

In the first half of the game, you get repeated calls from AAava’s girlfriend about life back home, all of which you let go to voicemail. They initially start as just check up calls, with her just curious to know if you’re doing well while climbing a summit responsible for the most deaths of any other on earth. But as you go on, the calls get more…confrontational. You can hear the frustration in her girlfriend’s voice as she repeatedly asks what in God’s name Aava could get from climbing a mountain that she can’t get from being physically near the love of her life. The fact that Aava can’t come up with a great answer is one of her core conflicts, but worse than that, she begins to feel the ways in which her time away from her loved ones is making her miss out on their lives. The state Aava is in when climbing is likely a high that few people ever get, but how much is worth sacrificing for that high? Is missing the death of someone you love worth that high? Is losing contact with a once dear friend worth chasing that high? Is spiking the anxiety of those who do still care deeply about you worth chasing that high?

At the end of the game, it asks the player, not Aava, “what is your summit?” This fucked me up because I realized I had answered this question in my own head hours before. While I have never climbed anything more involved than what I encountered at Tallulah Gorge, I do have a hobby that makes me feel the same way Aava feels when climbing a mountain. That thing is this, the very act of processing art and writing about it. I love it so much that, when I experience art that is especially moving, I often don’t let my life move forward until I’ve immortalized those thoughts onto a page somewhere. Just like Aava when climbing, sometimes I stumble. Sometimes I delete entire paragraphs, sometimes I don’t quite have the vocabulary or expertise to describe something adequately, and sometimes I just can’t find it in me to form deep thoughts about even my favorite pieces of art. Sometimes I just like shit, and trying to find 5000 words to say just that is a fool’s errand. But despite the difficulties, nothing beats the high of articulating myself so well that others manage to the hyper specific ways I resonate with art. But, while I did technically go to school for this, I do not make a living doing this. Over the years, I’ve kept an eye on the state of media criticism, and I doubt I’ll ever have a stable industry to look to for a job doing this. So, I fit writing, the thing I love doing more than most things, in the margins of my life. That is fine, most people have to fit their hobbies around the rest of their lives, and Aava getting to do her passion for a living is an incredibly rare and privileged opportunity. But especially when your obsessions are not your day job, it can be easy to fall into the same behaviors as Aava does.

As I reached the summit of Kami late at night, it was Independence Day. Here in America, it is the day we celebrate the birth of our nation, which officially occurred 250 years ago. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t find it in my heart to celebrate this country at all considering *gestures at everything*, but as I heard distant fireworks go off in the distance under Aava’s pained screams, I began to think about the things I put on hold for the sake of experiencing and discussing art. While I did just attend a family reunion in Florida the prior weekend, and therefore wanted to recharge my social battery a bit, I did feel just a little bit bad about not even inquiring what local friends were doing that night. I wanted to stay home and complete a video game I was deeply enjoying, but some of the friends I could have hit up I hadn’t caught up with in weeks, sometimes months. I think back to all the other free weekends I spent writing about art, or experiencing art, and I began to feel a bit like Aava: loving the state of connecting with my passions, but not wanting the rest of life to pass me by as I do so. But it can be incredibly difficult to balance the needs of those close to you with the urge you have within to chase your passions. In Aava’s case, already having a partner who can be open about those concerns can make it easy to know what squeaky wheel in life needs the most oil. But if you have no romantic partners, only a spread of family members and friends, most of which with other friend groups, relationships, and passions of their own to manage, it can be hard to tell when you are neglecting any of them.

Once I finally picked up Cairn again, after those 5 months of it gathering dust, I was deeply grabbed by its gameplay and world. I spent almost one entire Saturday night playing the game, and it consumed all of my thoughts for days after that. But once I finally put the controller down that night, I took a shower and knew exactly what song I wanted to wash to, the same song I played for my friend Buddha that day in the Georgia sun. I have never quite been the target demographic for Miley Cyrus, despite her certainly having touched my era of pop culture repeatedly. But one song I genuinely love from her is from the movie of the show that made her a household name: The Climb. As someone who has listened to maybe 10 country songs before Beyonce started making them, and maybe only loved 4 of them, this is absolutely one of the four. It has a killer climax, but what makes the song special is the accent to that climax. It starts slow, and builds and builds until the emotion of the song bursts like a once suppressed scream. As I stood in that shower, it hit me that the lyrics reinforced this idea that it’s not about the climax, or even getting past the struggle, it’s about the struggle itself having meaning. Most people with passions, obsessions, hobbies do it not because they have a specific goal in mind, though they often do. It’s not because they want to even be perceived as one of the best to do a task, though many often do. I feel that most people have these obsessions because they actually enjoy the micro-work of it all, the day by day struggle of doing the work well, and getting better at it with each failed attempt and subsequent retry. It’s the reason most artists with any integrity despise AI generation so strongly. If the creation of art is only meant to lead to a product to sell, then the act of creation has no meaning, which is music to the ears of a capitalist, but a nightmare scenario for any real artist.

We’re at a time right now where capitalism is dying a long overdue death, and those of us who can see that clearly are discussing what could, or should be next. I think the worst thing capitalism ever did was make us, and especially myself, forget that, to a certain extent, struggling is the point of human existence. Writing was never supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to take years of bad drafts and life experience to find your voice and know how to use it well consistently. It was never supposed to be easy to take a lift straight to the top of a mountain instead of spending days and weeks suffering up the side of it. But the modern state of culture, due to unrestrained advancement of capitalism, tells us that we don’t need to struggle, or even feel an ounce of discomfort ever. Can’t make art yourself? AI can generate it for you. Can’t articulate yourself well? AI  can do it for you. Can’t climb a literal mountain? Well this lift can do it for you. However, outside of reasons relating to disability, all of us DO have the capacity to do all of these things if we really wanted to. You can be an artist if you just pick up a pencil. You can do the same if you wanna be a writer. You can just explore the rock-covered wilderness in your own backyard if you too wanna climb like Aava someday, but we have been convinced that is a foolish task when all of these perceived “shortcuts” are available.

I think this yearning to remove the necessary friction of existence stems from the fact that so much friction that exists in our lives today is actually artificial. Not just in the way that Aava insists on climbing actual mountains instead of climbing walls in the air conditioned safety of indoors. Not just in the way that I try to actually see a movie or play a game these days before I contribute to the discourse online about it. But in the way that health insurance is a complicated labyrinth of expenses designed to be nearly impossible to navigate. In the way that “doing your taxes” is an overly complicated mess that could get you arrested if you get any of your information (that the government already has access to) wrong. In the way that slavery is still legal in the United States if you happen to be presented to a judge that decided you broke a law bad enough to have you end up in prison. There is so much man made, senseless struggling in this world that it is hard for anyone to believe that the struggle is actually the thing life is meant to be about. They say hard times make strong men, but when those bad times are so clearly artificially created by just a few men who have never experienced a true hard time, believing in that statement makes no sense.

That’s the reason Cairn is a game that sits so heavy on my heart after beating it. When it asked “what is your summit?”, I indeed thought about my love of writing and all of the quiet nights of introspection I spent on it instead of doing other things. To me, almost all of those nights were worth it, because I’ve enjoyed the work. But I wanna get that way about all of the struggles in my life. I wanna form new friendships and relationships not just because I want to have new connections with people I share more in common with, but because I want to like the act of getting to know new people. I want to go on more and more involved hikes like Tallulah Gorge not just because I want the bragging rights of saying I did it, or the eventual health benefits of that physical activity, I want to enjoy the activity itself, as I’m doing it. I want to enjoy the day by day work of all aspects in my life, but it can be hard to shift to that mindset when so many of those aspects are only hard for reasons that have nothing to do with nature. I want everything to be my summit, but some of those more frustrating, manmade mountains will fall in time, once the forces that created them lose enough power. I want to make sure the summits I do conquer are not only the ones that stick around the longest, but the ones that I truly care about climbing. Because I can never climb every mountain, and sometimes when I am forced to try anyway, nothing but getting to the other side will be on my mind. But like Aava ascending to the summit of Kami, I hope I can find it in myself to enjoy The Climb as much as possible. Because, that is truly what it’s all about.