🧗 Mechanics that Explore the Narrative - How Jusant Highlights Themes of Naivety and Ignorance through Liberating World and Mechanical Design

Another essay from the old blog. Jusant was a climbing game that dropped during a summer where all I was doing was climbing. It was a fantastic experience, and one I'm glad I got to have at the time. The game definitely holds up, and I would recommend any of you to go and experience it yourself if you can.

Mechanics that Explore the Narrative - How Jusant Highlights Themes of Naivety and Ignorance through Liberating World and Mechanical Design

Video games, as they have grown exponentially larger in scale, have become one of the strongest mediums for creating worlds. From Elden Ring’s incredible scale of the Lands Between to Breath of the Wild’s incredibly dense and layered depiction of Hyrule, we have been blessed with some truly splendid open worlds in recent time. With that however, has come many forgettable and mediocre open worlds, best summed up through the synonymous tag of them being a Ubisoft Open World (sorry not sorry Ubisoft), or rather ones which appear more concerned with checking boxes for arbitrary content than actually creating a dynamic gameplay experience. The issue rising from this time and time again, is the push for vast open worlds, without consideration for mechanics, or player agency in exploring these open worlds.

Jusant, a climbing game developed by Life is Strange developers, DON’T NOD, was a game that came under my radar after it was revealed at the Xbox Gaming Showcase last year. A wonderful coincidence was that the summer this game was revealed, was the summer I got into climbing. Climbing had been something I had done on occasion in the past, and while it was a hobby I always wanted to develop, it wasn’t until the summer of 2023 that me and for some inexplicable reason our entire friend group, began climbing.

Picture it, caught in the cycles of poor accommodation and even poorer retail work, the daily expeditions to our college climbing wall became pilgrimages of delight. Needless to say, I fell in love with the pastime. Complete freedom of moment to scale along walls, set routes and push limits. The experience was genuinely nothing short of brilliant, and it’s still a beloved hobby of mine now. So when Jusant was revealed, during the peak of this climbing arc, you can imagine we lost our collective minds. Jump to now, and I’ve finally had the opportunity to play through it, and as a climber and lover of games I can attest that DON’T NOD really blew it out of the water with this one.

Beginning the game, you are told very little but are rather introduced to the world and the protagonist in tandem. The world, being a massive tower of rock and mountain which scales into the heavens in a feat of sublime spectacle, and the character being a quirky glasses wearing dude with an ADORABLE little squishy worm companion. Knowing nothing more than that, the game lets you off with the only tangible objective being, go up. You are eased into the mechanics as you climb, with your triggers controlling the grip and release of your hands, allowing you to realistically maneuver yourself along rock faces, grip at a time. The controls are tactile, and give you concise control over your own movement. Where many other games let you parkour with the simple hold of a button and pivot of a stick, Jusant gives you direct input over the step-by-step process of the climb, and in doing so allows you complete freedom on how you utilize the movement mechanics. This is done incredibly seamlessly and in combination with the excellent piton and rope mechanics, you are given the tools to challenge the environmental trials of the world as you see fit.

Because of the nuance of this, players are exposed to a complete appreciation of the world itself. The malleability of the mechanics means that every rock, cliff face and piton point is appreciated, as the process of analyzing your routes is integral to applying the mechanics to traverse through the game. This embraces all aspects of the game’s design, as you progress through the narrative, and learn how your mechanics apply to the world, you discover more about the world itself.

Jusant tells a beautiful story through it’s gameplay, as you find yourself collecting notes and letters left by those who have previously traversed the world. Additionally, there are conch shells littered along the climb which allow you to listen to the sounds which once occupied an area. These brief ASMR inducing moments, tell a story of a world which once was filled with gushing water from the heavens, and are now desolate from drought. Through the writings of previous adventurers, you learn more about this emergent narrative, and understand that this drought has tormented them as they desperately search for a solution. Your findings lead you to the conclusion that through the perpetuated cycle of trying to control the flow of water and the course of nature, humanity itself has caused this drought.

The world of Jusant warns of the consequences that come when ignoring the natural wonder of nature. Through attempting to control the water, and as you learn later also attempting to hunt the Ballasts (the mystical whale-like creatures which reside atop the Tower, and are also the source of the water in this world), the people of this world have halted nature by refusing to work in tandem with it. In a stark juxtaposition to this, our quest to restore water to the Tower, sees us working with the help of a baby Ballast (who, I repeat, is freaking adorable). Our climb is driven by the mechanical means by which we traverse, but is further empowered by the abilities of the Ballast, who is able to spring plants to life and whir nature into motion to allow us to climb further. Through this implementation of traversal, we learn how dependent we are mechanically on the Ballast, and therefore learn how dependent our goal (restoring water to the world) is on our capability to work with nature rather than against it.

This is done incredibly seamlessly, allowing the world and mechanics to feel like one integral system rather than a series of puzzles designed around a mechanic. A very similar concept is executed in Rainworld, a survival platformer developed by VIDEOCULT. Like Jusant, the world you explore in Rainworld tells a story of a once thriving place which has since gone to ruin. Also like Jusant, the traversal mechanics are simple yet intricate in their implementation, as you trial and error your way through the broken ecosystem. In Rainworld, you play as a slugcat, an enigmatic creature that is exposed to the harshness of the world just as the player is. As slugcat, your abilities are very primitive, allowing you just enough maneuverability to traverse the world and interact with basic objects, dependent entirely on the flora and fauna of it’s lands.

Where Rainworld expands into a realm of truly intuitive game design, is the shifting ecosystem it entraps you in. The narrative tells a story of a world stuck in cycles, primarily of life and death, and the endless repetition faced by those who find themselves traversing these cycles. While the lore of Rainworld is an essay for another day, what is relevant is how the constant attempts of creatures to break the natural cycle of the world, brings ruin to the world itself. The catastrophic rainfall that erases and drowns out life each day is caused by Iterators, beings made to assist in the process of ascending out of the life and death cycle. In addition to the rainfall, the Rot (which will become the bane of your existence, trust me) is another element of ruin within the world spawned from the Iterators. Throughout Rainworld, you mechanically succeed through blind trial and error, and in doing so are exposed to the hazards of the world, which you learn have spawned from other fruitless cycles of other beings own trials.

Due to the nature of both these games’ narratives being so associated with their worlds, the process of learning the mechanics, their application to the games’ designs and the story told through the worlds all progress in tandem. This works especially well across both these games where naivety is a core theme in their narratives. Through the mechanical implementation of naivety, by the player knowing little about the world and having to discover this through applying what little mechanics they know, these games are able to highlight the stark contrast between naivety and ignorance. In both these games cases, the predecessors of the protagonists which have caused ruin within the game worlds are all harbingers of ignorance, ignoring the rules of the natural worlds they occupy despite having superior knowledge than the player. Through introducing the player to these worlds under the lens of naivety, the narratives is able to expose players to the crux’s and mistakes of their natural worlds and allow them to form realizations based off the mistakes of the past.

This is how Jusant’s story beautifully combines the learning process of climbing, with the experience of embracing the natural world. The further you move up the Tower, and the more you uncover about the world, you find yourself increasingly driven to apply yourself to the challenge for the sake of the journey, and uncover what secrets lie ahead for the sake of appreciating the world which has accommodated you thus far. By having the application of mechanics completely in the hands of how the player interprets the worlds, the game encourages collaboration with the natural world both through it’s design and narrative.

This allows Jusant to tell it’s story, which begins as a humbling journey up an enigmatic Tower of drought, and evolves into a land riddled with echoes of past journeys and experience. Each bit of history discovered by the player contributes to a larger narrative which all drives the one motivation to scale the Tower, a goal which ultimately solves the problem of the drought while also allowing the player to learn the moral fault which allowed the drought to happen in the first place. This blend of gameplay and narrative was definitely the highlight of Jusant, that and the scattered segments of extended climbing which really feigned that feeling of bouldering some great cliff face (tickling that dormant climber itch that resides in us all). I find it funny that despite the endearing narrative that tells of a story of appreciating nature and it’s subtleties, I would happily play a version of this game which was exclusively one, long isolated climb. I say this with no intention of devaluing the games narrative, but simply out of appraisal for how fun the mechanics are throughout the experience.

As mentioned at the start of this post, discovering climbing was a wonderful rupture that allowed me to appreciate a lot of my time during a period where the perilous cycles of life (and retail work) were taking their toll. I can firmly attest to how Jusant mirrors this feeling, providing the player with mechanics to explore, and an even more wondrous world to explore. In a market oversaturated with mediocre open world games, Jusant embraces linearity by saturating it’s world with detail, detail that contributes to the entire tone and narrative in tandem with the mechanics to allow for a fulfilling experience in what is otherwise a story about climbing up a big tower.

It’s no surprise that DON’T NOD were the minds behind this. With their previous titles hinging on narratives that drove the gameplay, it was incredibly refreshing for a game where the gameplay drove the narrative. I’m hoping to see more games in future utilize precise movement controls as a mechanism to inspire design rather than gimmicks which oftentimes limit and define the puzzle design. Sometime in the future I’ll write a blog post delving into Rainworld’s narrative and gameplay design in great depth, as that game is an unbelievable diamond in the rough which explores many of Jusant’s systems and themes, but with many additional layers of nuance. Thanks once again for reading this post, if either of these games sound your speed I would highly recommend checking them out as their gameplay is as fun and intriguing to delve into as their spiraling worlds and narratives. You should also totally start climbing after reading this post, that is not a suggestion but an order. With that being said, I hope you have a damn good one,

Goodnight and good luck.