I started playing Cairn for video game club, which is trying to be a realistic climbing game; it's got the route finding that I enjoyed from Peak, but it seems all about finding hand holds and moving your limbs qwop-like into a correct position to not use too much stamina. Aava is also kind of a jerk, which I love.

In some ways it is incredibly cool, that it feels like the mechanics are very physics based; you lose (invisible) stamina if you have bad or unstable holds, or if you pretzel your limbs, and Aava starts shaking and the screen starts turning black; there's much less direct feedback than a lot of other games and it seems like they've come up with a really cool system.

In other ways, it has truly tested my frustration threshold and it might be the first video game club game I DNF for difficulty reasons. Mostly I just continue to be incredibly bad at it, even at parts that feel like "the beginning" or "the easy route" and I'm not sure I have it in me to scale this mountain. Mount Celeste, sure. Mount Kami, idk man

I do like Cairn's route view where it shows where you've been (and where you've continually fallen off the tutorial climbing wall)

it's very silly, but I do enjoy Cairn's physics-based backpack system

you can even hit rb to "shake the bag" repeatedly and try to make room for more stuff; theoretically you could move things around manually, but why