How was that, that the trees do not prevent you from seeing the forest, or something like that. I have always been pretty bad at sayings, but I am no longer 15 years old enough to grab every 2 × 3 to the “kick in the co**nes”. The fact is that both sentences come in handy to explain what I felt just after finishing the test of what, of course, is one of my most anticipated games of this 2023.
the forest is called jusantthe trees go from the faces of Starfield to the water of Spider-Man 2, and the kick in the crotch is to fall into that loop of meaningless complaints and polemics that lead nowhere while an endless amount slips through our fingers. number of games that are difficult, almost impossible, to keep track of.
What a gem is Jusant
jusant, by Don’t Nod, is the typical pretty game that seems to be there to fill a gap in a conference that the triple-A industry can no longer fill. One of those jewels that enter your retina for a few seconds but are inevitably forgotten after a couple of weeks if there is no crush to prevent it.
Today, with the first gap in a few crazy days in which there has been time for little, I have decided that I wanted to experience first-hand the other side of E3, that of the beautiful and endearing games that do not usually enjoy that crush despite deserve it much more.
jusant It is not going to revolutionize anything, and in fact, especially for those of us who are fans of climbing and try to get closer to all the games that want to pay tribute to this sport with more or less success, it is likely that you have already seen its mechanics in more from a site
In any case in jusant the inspiration debate fades quickly, as soon as you understand that the strength here is not in the mechanics you use to climb, but in the design of the wall that aims to exploit them.
Under the idea of squeezing the trigger so that the corresponding hand is grasped, the rest of the movement, both to orient the body and the hand that is free, is carried out only with the left joystick, thus breaking with the need to be going to a joystick and another to control which stone we grab next.
One of those games that warm your soul
It has a bit of deceit, from that of automatically grabbing onto a stone that was still further than your arm could reach, but the support is appreciated in favor of a simplicity that ends up being paramount.
With that jusant steps into the terrain of the fish factory from What Remains of Edith Finch, getting you to start climbing and moving hands here and there almost intuitively. Before you know it, you’re effortlessly playing something that has made you stop for a couple of seconds during the first few bars.
Despite not giving many clues as to how far the idea will scale (JE JE), the demo that you already have available on Steam does give up a bit of space to demonstrate that, wall to wall, it is capable of introducing new mechanics and variations that break with any kind of heaviness.
There’s resting your hands, being able to attach up to three carabiners to secure jumps, and the play of using rappelling and loose rope to swing yourself to otherwise inaccessible spots. How much it borrows from Grow Home by leveraging flora to create new supports remains to be seen, but in any case it seems like it has enough tricks up its sleeve.
That we can continue climbing mountains like the one in jusant It is proof that, despite the noise generated by tension and bad feelings, behind all this nonsense there is still an industry capable of surprising us and making us fall in love. It is worth stopping for a minute from time to time to check that this has not changed.