Jusant plays wonderfully, and it's coming to Game Pass: be excited

Captain Kirk is climbing the mountain. Why is he climbing the mountain? Because it’s there. Kirk doesn’t need a good reason to climb the mountain: being a man triumphing over nature is its own reward. You don’t need a good reason to watch Star Trek V: The Final Frontier either, because there aren’t any, although a stiff drink is usually recommended. Jusant is all about triumphing over the environment. There aren’t any enemies to clobber or binary moral decisions to make: your chief interaction with the world is grabbing onto handholds, which you do by coordinating your trigger presses with deft left-stick manipulation that gives you precise individual control over each arm. You can also drive pins into the wall in order to swing, abseil, and wall run. It controls similarly to Ubisoft’s Grow Home, although it’s much more forgiving. A sort of halfway house between that game’s obtuseness and the superhuman one-button climbing of something like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed. It’s a balance that Don’t Nod has absolutely nailed, giving Jusant’s climbing enough trickiness to keep you engaged, but enough leeway that it just feels good in the hands. With practice, it starts to become second nature, at which point the game introduces some more complicated manoeuvres for you to master. This gives you, the player, a sense of personal accomplishment, and not something simulated through gathering EXP and incremental stat gains. Read more