Jusant Review
Jusant was one of the more visually appealing games from Microsoft’s showcase last year. A bright, colorful game about climbing... from the team at Don’t Nod. You know the "Life is Strange" people. A studio known for its captivating storytelling and dramatic plot lines that drag you along for the ride is making a climbing game. Sure. Jusant nails so many of Don’t Nods strengths that they consistently nail in each of their releases, but they're buried behind questionable design and gameplay decisions that I feel will lose a large chunk of the player base before they actually get a grasp of what’s about to unfold. While the base gameplay loop is fun and solid, not enough is really added throughout to expand your expertise with techniques or knowledge of how your tools and momentum work.
Jusant starts you at the base of a mountain with seemingly one object going up. Equipped with phenomenal upper-body strength and basic climbing tools, you begin your journey. Following pretty straight-forward environmental and color-changing queues to predetermined climbing paths, you’ll work your way through six visually stunning and distinct chapters. Some areas give off a strange sense of being in a place you’re not supposed to be and seeing remnants of a bustling civilization left to rot and decay without warning. Between working your way around rock structures and being wedged between tight crevices, you’ll come to flat outcroppings dug into the side of the mountain. Homes, shops, community baths, and other essential parts of a community are sitting barren, giving only hints at who or what occupied their space before. For the keen-eyed observer, you’ll come across handwritten notes and bulletins, some following a specific named character's story, and miscellaneous things like store inventory lists that give a wider sense of life to the surrounding areas. Sadly, however, if you’re someone who’s not into exploring, almost every one of Jusant’s pieces of story will be completely overlooked, leaving you almost 100% clueless as to what is going on and what your journey is trying to do. Having your story completely hang on someone actively looking for collectibles is a questionable route, to say the least. Even as someone who collected every single collectible, there are still parts of the story I have questions about or could’ve elaborated upon.
Sometimes, while climbing, you may need more than just your hands and arms; this is where your rope and pitons come into play. Your rope allows you to suspend yourself down the mountainside, gaining momentum while running across flat surfaces and swinging for further jumps. Pitons are devices that allow you to sort of reset your progress on your current stretch, anchoring yourself into the wall and resetting your length of rope while giving you time to regain your lost stamina. While having 3 of these at your disposal, I rarely, if ever, had to use even 2 of them, as there’s similar devices scattered throughout the mountains, giving you the same benefits. Now should be the time to mention that you have a living embodiment of water in your backpack. A cute little guy, the ballast acts as a trigger for environmental changes. Having its energy tied into natural forces around, clicking its corresponding button next to a vine causes it to stretch and expand, opening the next pathway for you, or attracts little lightning bugs to surround your person and propel yourself upward past more distant gaps. While an interesting mechanic, it’s nothing you fully have control over but something that just has you pressing another button every now and then. You have no real control or choice in interacting with Ballast, as it’s just sort of waiting for his next queue to appear to help you along. I would’ve loved to have this expanded to open up opportunities for puzzles or other gameplay mechanics to break up the gameplay time a little more.
In my personal opinion, the art style and pure visual spectacle are Jusant's strong points. Every new area you come to is visually stunning and extremely diversified; it's almost hard to imagine how the areas are connected together. There’s one specific scene at the very start of chapter 5 that made me stop in amazement. The way the camera sort of sweeps up and shows you a mossy-covered wall beaten and constantly attacked by a storm had me screenshotting it to use as a background on my PC right away. There’s so many examples of reaching a longer stretch of a climb just to barely pull yourself up over the ledge to be met with a beautiful vista or inner cave system lit up by glowing plant life and out of this world animals. The tone and setting are constantly evolving, offering you new scenery while being face-to-face with rock for your entire journey.
Jusant is a great experience for those of you who want to put time into it. It sounds overused nowadays, but the more you put into it, the more you’ll get back out of your experience. If you spend the time to learn about the world and immerse yourself in the story that becomes pure fantasy with mythical creatures, you’ll be greatly rewarded. If your main task is to just quickly run through and roll credits, your experience will drastically differ and may be a grind to get through. This makes it difficult to say Jusant is a highly recommended game, but if you’re looking for something "different," such as uncovering lost history, this will definitely grab your attention. I’m happy to see Don’t Nod branch out of their norm and make even more artsy games that I could only assume are passion projects. For now, I’ll eagerly await the team’s next outing and enjoy the experience I got out of my roughly 6 hours with Jusant. We give Jusant our official score of 7/10. Jusant is currently available on PS5, Steam, the Windows Store, Xbox Series consoles, and GamePass.