Game Review: Jusant
Jan 7, 2025
TL;DR: Visually beautiful, short and fun. While it felt a bit predictable, there was an overall charm that I loved. Great indie game overall, very happy that I played it. Do recommend!
Disclaimer: Mild spoilers ahead, personal opinions, proceed accordingly. Not sponsored.
On my new journey as a gamedev designer, I want to explore interesting games that bring something new to the table.
A game I recently completed was Jusant, an indie by Don't Nod Studio.
The setting
You start near the base of a humongous pillar? mountain? piece of earth that jets out towards the sky? A huge tower that looks to have once been inhabited by people like the protagonist.
So up you go. On your trek, you find personal notes and communication tidbits between unseen characters, small critters that skittle around and remains of homes and stores either carved onto the outside and inside of the ginormous tower. No-one else is around.
Just you, your rope and… your blobby magic animal friend that mostly sleeps in your backpack, and occasionally provides some clues in the form of sparkly echolocation. You have a few pitons to stick in the walls and help you from falling, the blob and your stamina.
The gameplay
The main mechanic of the game is: climbing to reach new heights, swing on your rope to grab onto a far away ledge or rappel down to get out of a dead end. To perform most of these, you use the Left + Right trigger buttons (L2/R2 on PS5) to grab with your respective hands onto stuff. At some point it this mechanic started getting a bit tedious, so I activated the 'Reverse' option in settings to highly improve my experience after the 3rd checkpoint.
The stamina meter UI widget was pretty good, indicating with ease how much of your stamina can be recovered by resting, and you're under stress. The proximity to the protagonist was a great decision, having it always in view.
The world mechanics like wind gusting upwards allowing you to jump higher and grab a far away ledge, stamina depletion due to the sun hitting your unprotected head (glassed ain't cutting it apparently), blob-activated plants that instantly grew as if from a magic bean were quite fun. The routes were also quite nice, offering a change of setting on the different sides of the tower, as well as on the inside.
I wanted the game to offer me some kind of climbing upgrade, either start with 0 pitons and provide more as you find them discarded in the abandoned dwellings, more stamina or a different way to climb that's not terrain-depended.
The hidden spots off the beaten main path were nice discoveries, and the discoverable hints on the walls -about the events of the past, before you started scrapping your elbows on the cliffs- felt magical.
When the other huge blobby magic animal appeared, and let me climb on it, I got super excited. Alas, it didn’t last long, as having it essentially teleport me to the top of the tower via a cutscene was a bit of a let down. The ultimate climb on the final plateau was decent but not mind-blowing. I think it could have used more of the world mechanics introduced earlier in the game, such as the wind gusts.