This game has huge potential, but the concept doesn't feel fully realised.
The climbing mechanics can feel very intuitive in some core segments of the game, its fun to explore different routes and try to challenge yourself, but I noticed in side areas and content theres a tendancy for the walls to feel unresponsive to your movements, because the climbing system selects from a small number of potential holds, the mobility can actually feel incredibly limited in places where it feels the devs had less time to test holds and different positions. The limb selection is obviously incredibly finicky, but I also found the strongly recommended automatic limb selection to be nearly completely useless and detrimental, as it constantly put me into unstable holds or took vital limbs off stong holds. With the stamina cooldown being understandably unforgiving, there's added pressure for the non-intuitive control scheme to operate effectively all the time, which is rarely the case, and makes speedruns or challenge runs feel infeasible despite sounding pretty fun conceptually. The stamina loss can also feel easily cheesed and I ran into a short series of very disruptive bugs throughout my ascent.
The survival and resource management system is highly immersive, cooking and storing meals and sleeping in your tent makes you feel like you're really on the mountain, but the speed at which these resources drain is pretty distracting to the core climbing mechanics. The story was immersive and I felt a connection to Aava as a character, but it's not really engaging enough to keep me going past the half way point unless something crazy is about to happen that I've missed.
This game would benefit hugely from a sequel, but it just came out and is still getting new content, so I'm kind of out of it now. Was definitely fun for a couple hours but I wouldn't recommend beyond that unless you fall in love with the controls and the climbing mechanics.
