Everything I know about mountain climbing came from a corporate team-building day where management hired a banker who’d scaled Everest to tell us how he left most of his group to die in order to reach the summit. This wasn’t a guilty confession. Apparently there comes an altitude where halting becomes so dangerous that it dooms any dawdlers. You carry on going or expire on the spot. As the then editor of a failing games magazine I couldn’t see any reading of the metaphor where I wasn’t the struggler and my website peers weren’t being told to leave me. Hilariously, this was not the bleakest moment of the day (that was some nervous guy from IT bellowing “Show me the money!” to win book tokens or similar bullshit).
What stuck with me is how all or nothing a climb could be, something you commit to until you either get a killer anecdote or end as another speck of colourful polyester in Rainbow Valley. In this sense, Insurmountable’s decision to equate mountaineering with a survival roguelike is astute: one life, one run, all the while coping with the random luck or misfortune dealt by an unpredictable landscape. This is not a polite hobby where you bank your progress for another day, and in this sense the do or die of a roguelike run feels more honest than the hilly simulations of Death Stranding or myriad VR climbing walls currently available. Just as a concept, I want to celebrate the cleverness of it all.