Bring on the wall!
And this is whereJusant’s Steam demobegins.
What manner of post-apocalypse is this?
It’s a dry one.
Jusant
This is an apocalypse that’s doing double duty.
It doesn’t just give you an end-of-the-world you could understand, but it gives you a look too.
When I first saw Jusant in the Xbox Summer Showcase, I thought it was channeling Gaudi a bit.
Shards of pottery and bleached bone and all that jazz.
Turns out that Gaudi’s encrusted art style matches rather closely with the things the sea leaves behind.
Arches of whale bone, rust, glinting coral.
Metal things with corners rubbed smooth, paint long gone, shapes part eaten away, part broken.
You are a lone traveller faced with a huge tower to climb.
A mountain, but also more than a mountain.
It’s had bits added on, bits drilled into it.
It goes up but in a higgledy human way.
Upwards and upwards, weirder and weirder, outside and indoors.
Even in the demo it’s quite a journey.
Jusant uses the climbing system I first encountered inGrow Home: one trigger for each of your grabby hands.
That squeezing of the triggers also makes it densely physical.
Jusant takes things further, though.
You check your angles.
You let go and jump and hope you connect, hope you grip on in time.
I never once started to take it for granted in the demo.
I never internalised it to the point where I could forget it.
It was always a joyful terror, a real risk.
The level design is magic, if you ask me.
Thrillingly, though, it’s great when things go wrong.
By the time I reached the end of the demo, I was properly in love.
And what’s this?
I wasn’t really that high up.
What would I find up there?
Can’t wait to see.
