Like most people who play videogames, I like my habits. I enjoy starting my day with my daily Geoguessr challenge, and shutting off a long, hard day at work with a stressful game of Valorant. It’s hard to break this toxic cycle unless something truly ground-breaking comes my way. And it is definitely too early to say it, and I’m almost certainly jinxing it right now, but I think my friends and I may have finally found a way out with Peak — a new cooperative game.
There’re actually so many reasons why Peak shouldn’t work, but despite that, it is incredibly fun. You see, this game is ridiculously simple. You find yourself at the bottom of a mountain, and you must climb to the top. That’s it. The controls are as bare-bones as the premise — find a ledge, hit the climb button, haul yourself up. You scan the landscape for your next move and repeat. There are only a handful of peaks to conquer in the game, following which you may unlock the higher difficulty. In theory, this sounds like a game you’d play just once and forget. So, how does a game like this possibly be something you could replay with friends? Well, things do get interesting.
Reason 1: The hunger-o-meter
The longer you wait, the more hungry you get. Hunger implies stamina loss, which means that you can’t scale more challenging ledges. Combatting hunger requires carrying food items you might pick up along the way, but you only have so many carry slots, which are probably spent on taking more important items. So what do you do? Here, survival often hinges on the one friend who holds a backpack. You will often find yourself yelling across the mountain for that one mule-friend just so they can bring you half a coconut to keep you moving. But watch out for suspicious-looking mushrooms and oddly coloured fruits. Food poisoning at halfway up a mountain isn’t the most ideal thing to happen in this game.
Reason 2: Proximity chat and ‘Ghosting’
The game has in-built proximity chat, which implies that you will hear exactly where your friends are, even if you don’t immediately see them. A blessing if you’re the type to get lost easily. If I’m being honest about it, in this game, proximity chat is mostly comic relief. There’s something frustratingly hilarious about catching the faint, echoing remains of someone’s voice as they plummet into a cavern or wander miles away from you. And when a player dies, they actually haunt the bubble around you and hover as a ghost. Watching your friends’ voices come out of these rag doll-type figures, stumbling over a rock and struggling to climb when you can do nothing about it, can be absolutely hysterical.
Reason 3: The real summit is the friends you made along the way
Sure, you could try to scale the whole peak alone — offline is a completely available mode if you’re looking for a challenge and finding the correct route to the top. But the actual fun is in the chaos of failing miserably with three other incompetent people. Coordinating lifts, sharing food, and rescuing people from ledges is half the fun. Teamwork here isn’t about conquering the summit, but arguing with each other about the optimal route to the top while you gradually build hunger and wait for the all-consuming fog to hit you all.
Reason 4: A new challenge every day!
The game has a new procedurally generated map every day. It has an almost Wordle-like quality to the whole thing, where you kind of want to just pick it up to see if you can find the best possible route in the simplest way.
Peak is currently topping the charts with its simplicity. It’s available to play on the PC via the Steam Store. It’s currently priced at Rs 359.
You should play it only if you can get a few other friends to buy it with you.