DaRmaZat Ascending to The Skies Above.
From the creators of Furi and Haven, Cairn is a survival-climbing adventure that dares you to reach a summit no one has ever conquered before. Releasing on January 29, and both developed and published by The Game Bakers, the game places you on the unforgiving slopes of Mount Kami, a mountain as beautiful as it is lethal. Styled with striking cel shaded art and supported by an evocative soundscape, Cairn sets the tone for a journey defined by tension, solitude, and transcendence.
A Life Dedicated to Rock Climbing
The story centers around Aava, a renowned professional climber who has dedicated her life to rock climbing. Now she wants to conquer the ultra-deadly Mount Kami. Accompanied by her loyal robotic drone, Climbot, which retrieves her pitons and also relays audio messages from the outside world, Aava pushes forward despite the problems, fears and objections of friends and family.
As the narrative progresses, the plot beats grow heavier, sometimes more dreamlike, at other times more emotional, but always increasingly personal. While the culture and history surrounding the mountain gradually reveal themselves, Cairn ultimately becomes a deeply introspective story about Aava herself, evolving into something that feels almost cathartic in nature.
Learning To Read the Wall
Cairn’s opening hours are much more lighthearted, though, and dedicated to extensive training. First on climbing walls, and later on more complex mountain terrain. On the latter, you always need to assess where to resume your ascent based on visible caves, cracks, and rock formations. A dedicated camera mode lets you survey the rock face from a distance and carefully plan your route in advance, a process that faintly recalled Death Stranding to me, more particularly in how deliberate and observational it feels.
Smooth surfaces are largely useless; success depends on finding holes, edges, and subtle variations in the rock. Weather conditions also matter, as wet surfaces reduce grip, snow can quickly cause you to slip, both making certain paths significantly more dangerous. As a small consolation, you always have your weather forecast device with you.
Not Really a Simulator, But More of A Mental Battle
Once you reach the end of the initial playground, the game asks you to decide whether to already attempt Mount Kami, or to continue practicing. From then on, I started to realize that Cairn is, above all, a routine and constant mental struggle. First, you have to observe the environment, read the rocks, plan a climb, attempt it, perform a small timing-based mini-game to push your self-screwing piton into the rock face, rappel up and down, and either fall or hold on to your grip while finding the perfect balance. When failing to do so, reconsider, and either try another path or stubbornly push forward.
In this sense, the game achieves a remarkably authentic sense of climbing tension. At the same time, it is clearly not a pure simulator. The occasionally unnatural limb contortions and exaggerated animations make that evident, but they also underline that Cairn is first and foremost a demanding adventure game focused on the emotional journey of ascent. Where the game truly excels, is in recreating the tension and release that define real rock climbing. Each wall feels like a boss fight, and every successful maneuver brings genuine relief. The intuitive climbing system allows you to find holds and place hands and feet with relatively simple controls, while constantly forcing you to consider posture, balance, and effort.
“Reaching a new height or uncovering a fresh section of the mountain remains deeply satisfying.”
As you can understand by now, Cairn is not a game to rush. Managing stamina is crucial, as is knowing when to rest. Pitons are very limited (unless you enable infinite supplies in the game options), forcing a constant risk-versus-security calculation. It can be meditative at times, nerve-wracking at others, but never fast if survival is your goal. Nevertheless, reaching a new height or uncovering a fresh section of the mountain remains deeply satisfying, especially when paired with sweeping vistas and a powerful musical score that often swells at just the right moment.
Difficulty, Assists, and Persistence
All the while, Aava must eat, drink, rest, and stay warm, while navigating an environment that does not feel empty at all. Wildlife such as ibexes, crows, and even bears can appear, occasionally attacking and knocking her off precarious ledges. There are also hints that others may have attempted the climb before you, though whether they are still alive, I leave it ominously unclear so as not to spoil anything for you.
“A single fall can easily erase thirty minutes or more.”
To prepare for the rest of the journey in calmness, from time to time, Aava needs to set up her bivouac—a small tent that can stand or hang depending on terrain, only to be placed at designated locations. There, you can cook meals by combining food and fluids, manage your backpack inventory including composting obsolete items into chalk, repair your broken pitons, recover from exhaustion by sleeping comfortably and, last but not least, manually save your progress. Most of the story progression unfolds here as well, through messages received from your friends and loved ones—not always with good news.
A single fall can easily erase thirty minutes or more of careful climbing. Over time, that loss can become frustrating. As a small compensation for its difficulty curve, Cairn offers three difficulty levels alongside an extensive, modular assist mode. Depending on the level set, during a climb, you can also enable rewinding the route to load a specific save point, which helps mitigate some of the harsher setbacks. Hand condition, piton durability, chalk usage, food preparation, cold resistance, and other survival mechanics can all be adjusted or disabled entirely, allowing players to tailor the experience to their tolerance level. There is also an option to manually control which limbs you move, and this quickly became my preferred approach. While slower, it avoided the automatic system’s tendency to force Aava into risky or unnatural positions that greatly increase the chance of falling.
Some Rocks Have Rough Edges
Aava’s shaking hands, knees, and feet can look exaggerated or even awkward at times, but these animations serve an important purpose. They clearly communicate loss of balance, just as the screen gradually desaturates when stamina runs low and a fall becomes imminent. When that happens, it is often already too late to quickly place a piton and clip in to rest. Exactly this anticipation, rather than reaction, is the core of Cairn’s gameplay philosophy.
As the climb continues, new mechanics are explained, including the usage of ice picks to climb ice walls together with your spiked footwear, as well as how to avoid powerful gusts of wind throwing you off balance. While the gameplay always continues to evolve, the final stretch introduced several ideas that felt to me like they could have been integrated earlier, making the late-game pacing slightly uneven.
Technically, Cairn is not flawless. Despite its mesmerizing hand‑designed, cel‑shaded art style crafted to give a hand‑drawn feel, performance issues do surface. Frame rate drops occur now and then, particularly while traversing on foot. There are also moments where Aava clips through rock surfaces, most notably after re-climbing from a piton following a fall. Further optimization and bug fixes will be required to significantly improve the experience.
Final Thoughts
Cairn’s difficulty curve remains steep throughout, which unfortunately limits replayability. While the game offers meaningful story choices and complete freedom in route selection, the sheer physical and mental commitment required to reach the summit will make a second full ascent hard to justify for most players. After twelve hours of climbing, falling, retrying, and enduring Aava’s increasingly strained vocal reactions, fatigue inevitably set in for me as well.
And yet, despite all of this, reaching the summit remains a powerful achievement. Seeing the conclusion of Aava’s journey after such a grueling climb left me with a lasting impression. No, Cairn is not a game for everyone, but for those willing to endure its hardships, it delivers a singular, unforgettable ascent.
Additional Information
Release Date: Jan 29, 2026
Reviewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: The Game Bakers
Publisher: The Game Bakers
Website: The Game Bakers
Relevant links: Available on STEAM
