The Slow War

A review of "Cairn", the persistence of a immovable foe, blacking out thousands of feet in the air, and examining the human condition.

The elements are nature’s standing army, and the mountain is the persistent foe… But the true battle here is within yourself.

Cairn is the first great game of 2026. It’s not just that, it’s one of my favorite indie games of the past few years, I think, as well. I put it up there with the hits of last year, games like Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, as well as games like Celeste and Balatro from years past, as a high watermark for the type of game that it is: “independently developed triumphs”. Cairn is full of intricate, bespoke game mechanics that never cease to impress, and it routinely displays frequent game design brilliance on behalf of the developers who crafted it. The Game Bakers have always been one of one. Not just with their games, but also as a studio. Rather than iterate on one or two ideas in their titles or work on sequels to capitalize on their previous efforts, they constantly switch it up, with every game in their development history being something completely different and distinct from the other.

Furi, Haven, and Cairn are all anomalies in the independent gaming development scene. They are each from the same developer, but are all different games in every way. It’s a fascinating thing that they do, making each game totally different from each other. I commend the dev team for taking risks. Their games are so different that, in fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking each game in their stable was made by different studios. But if you look closer, the innovation that carries to each title is the very thing that ties them all together at the hip.

It’s an intentional choice by The Game Bakers to make different projects. Maybe it’s so they challenge themselves? Maybe it’s because they get bored easily? Whatever the case, each one of their games is a breath of fresh air in its own way. Furi was an action-packed boss-rush game at its essence, and that’s way different than their following game, Haven, which was a visual-novel light RPG with relationship mechanics. In turn, Haven is a completely different game from Cairn, which is a patient, rock-climbing, movement-based game. But in some ways, that isn’t a good descriptor either. Maybe a ‘dramatic platformer’ works better? I dunno. In some ways, this game defies description. The point is, they try different things as a studio constantly, and that’s their superpower. I love that about them.

No matter the case, The Game Bakers have proven to be a versatile, accomplished developer in many ways. I’m thrilled to say then that I think Cairn is by far their best game and delivers on every level. It’s a fascinating, daunting, frustrating, towering epic of an indie climber that may just well contend for my top prize in my top 10 by the time this year has wrapped. I am that confident about my feelings about Cairn. It’s a genuine masterpiece, and I can say that even with the slight technical shortcomings that crop up from time to time throughout the game.

It’s not perfect, hell its even messy, but the messy details are what make this journey feel unique all on its own. Cairn has a lot to say, and the way it goes about conveying its themes is one of a kind. I doubt any other game I’ll play this year will be as revolutionary in its mechanical specificity as Cairn will be for me by the time we reach season’s end. This game feels like it’ll be your favorite developer’s next inspiration. I predict that Cairn could very well influence many more games going forward. It does so much, so well, so consistently, it’s shocking just how many new mechanical things they introduce in the gameplay that completely deliver on their stated goals. Cairn is phenomenal.

High praises to start, but let’s get into it properly now. The game revolves entirely around the character you play: Aava. She is a veteran mountain climber who is in pursuit of the one mountain no one has summited before: Mt. Kami. Aava is an isolationist by choice, choosing to remove herself from society and preferring to distance herself from her various relationships to instead focus on existing in the wild and make attempts at climbing really tall rocks. As a character, she has depth (the bulk of which can only be gotten into in a spoiler fashion since I have some pretty long thoughts on her as a person), but on a base level, Aava seems like the distant type. This is a bit off-putting at the start, but the more Cairn’s story rolls on, the more you get a peek into her psyche as an obsessed athlete driven mad by a desire to conquer a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. As stated previously, I have some thoughts about Aava that I will share a bit later.

On the menu, you have three options of difficulty to pick from. ‘Explorer’ is the easier setting, which offers more assists to the experience, such as more forgiving climbing, a de-emphasizing of the survival aspects of the mechanics (such as the necessity of needing to maintain your temperature, your hunger level, and your thirst meter), as well as other easier options if you prefer to play the game without as much hardship. The next difficulty, ‘Alpinist’, is the intended way Cairn expects you to play it, where all the survival systems are set to their default difficulty, and it seems like the best way to go about playing through the game for the first time. At least for me, it was. Having these mechanics push against you is crucial to the experience, and de-emphasizing these systems makes the game seem too easy for your first climb.

The joy is in the struggle, after all. It can be difficult, but I always found a way to make it, even if at times it can seem impossible. Harder still, then is the hardest mode: ‘Free Solo’, the hardest difficulty of Cairn, where everything is ratcheted up a notch: you can no longer save at bivouac checkpoints, and every slip or fall could mean a permanent end for Aava on her Mt. Kami climb, with permadeath being added here. Sounds brutal… It’d be fun one day to challenge myself and attempt to do that mode, but the idea is too daunting for me as it stands, currently. Fun idea though!

The game begins with an open-ended climbing tutorial where the game teaches you the ropes with different grades of difficulty for practice climbs, to properly prepare you for the tough mountain climb ahead. It’s a good taste of what’s to come, but even with the knowledge on how to perform higher grade climbs, I was not prepared for the sheer (and I do mean sheer) difficulty of some of the climbs you are asked to engage in on your ascent to the top of Kami.

Once you crest your first mountain wall, you are hit with the full breadth of the immovable enemy that is Kami, standing tall in the distance, a granite fortress intimidating in both its size and its brutalist jagged face. The full scale of the terrain in this scene is captured so well at the beginning of the game. Just taking in the view took my breath away. As I slowly made my way over the winding, low mountain path to the towering cliff face, I allowed myself to be swept away in awe of what I was experiencing. This was Kami. If I were a soldier on the front lines, and the battlefield was the mountain itself, this would be a slow war, indeed.

That’s one of the best things about Cairn. The game lays out your path so well, and with so much panache, you can’t help but get swept away in the spectacle. Wonderment then leads to anxiety, as you are then asked to climb up said paths and sheer mountain faces, with very few tools at your disposal to do so. Climbing up Kami looks kind of messy, and it’s the most unrealistic thing about the game. But it’s so engaging, you just won’t care.

The game’s climbing plays simply: you, as the player, have the option of either selecting a limb to move with the top right bumper on the gamepad (I played on PlayStation 5), or have the game auto-select for you which limb should move to the next small outcropping or crack in the mountain as you climb. Having the option to pick which arm or leg you wish to control for your next move is a useful tool in jams, but for the most part, the auto-selected limbic system works pretty well to get you where you need to go. It all takes a bit of getting used to, but I reveled in learning all the technical intricacies I could about it, as the knowledge I learned early in the adventure was incredibly beneficial to the later, more arduous climbs you take part in towards the end of the game. It’s difficult, surely, because as you climb, Aava’s body will wear down slowly as you keep ascending, and the more you move without attending to her status, the harder the climb will get.

The worse a spot you are in can cause some stress, as limbs will start to shake from the strain of the positions they’re in, and if not changed to more sound handholds or footing, will cause Aava to fall off the mountain, and to her death. There are brief respites along your ascent, however, with mountain pitons being essential to your climb, as hooking up to them offers some much-needed relief to Aava, and allows for the replenishment of resources to attend to the various status meters you have to keep an eye on for Aava’s constitution. These systems keep the whole game feeling tense and considered. I never felt like I had enough things to keep me alive on the climb, but I also never felt like I ran out of resources to restore myself. Kami provides as much as she takes in my opinion, and take, she does.

As you travel up the mountain, you find food and healing items to help keep Aava alive. As stated before, Kami provides, and even if you can’t find everything to keep yourself as alive as possible, you find just enough to get you by. You scavenge materials, find notes of other climbers who also attempted the ascent, and find enough food and water to sustain yourself throughout.

Once you make it to a checkpoint, a bivouac, you set up camp. From here, you can cook stat-boosting meals and snacks to keep you upright, you can re-tape your hands to continue on your climb, sleep to restore lost life, and repair broken pitons. Each one of these systems adds to the flavor of the world, Aava as a character, as well as the themes of the game. I really enjoyed making myself gourmet hot chocolate with herbs to juice up my stats, while attending to my thirst meter, for instance. Experimenting with what foods to make to allow for multiple stacks of bonuses to hit all at once is great fun. Some of the food doesn’t look great, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? It’s all about just making it by without dying. The push-and-pull between these systems and you as a player is so engaging. You always feel a hundred percent a part of the world in these moments. I was taken aback by how many little mechanics they put into the bivouac segments, and how well they were done, too. Feels fresh and new without being too off-putting. These mechanics add to the flavor of Cairn without being too complex or esoteric.

All the resources in the world can be great, sure, but it’s the times you don’t have enough that get the blood pumping. If Aava is left alone for too long without sleeping, getting fed, and getting watered, she will wilt, like that of a mountain edelweiss, and how these issues culminate and manifest are in ‘blackouts’. You will be climbing up the mountain, and if you are on your last legs, with your health dwindling and meters empty, you will collapse mid-air, hundreds of feet up in the sky. As you blackout, you as a player lose control of Aava completely, and if by some luck you’re hooked onto a piton screwed into the rock face, you’ll hang suspended in the chilling mountain air, instead of falling. These moments are terrifying. It takes a lot out of you when these moments (inevitably) happen, because they will happen.

One time while playing, I decided to keep going after blacking out (a really risky thing to attempt, by the way), because I was so close to reaching the next checkpoint on the climb. I extended myself just to the point of breaking before reaching the place I needed to go. It’s exhilarating, stressful, and empowering in equal measure to contend with these mechanics and survive by the literal skin of your teeth. It’s incredible. Rarely can I remember a game that thoroughly challenged my skills throughout a playthrough as this game did.

In some ways, the way Cairn plays it calls to mind two games from the past decade or so, for me. Death Stranding (also the second one, but less so than the first), and last year’s Baby Steps (my personal number 10 favorite game of last year). In both games, you get the feeling you are on a grand journey. In both games, your destinations are clear, the paths you take in each experience can be difficult, and the mechanics in both Baby Steps and the Death Stranding series are finicky enough to keep each game interesting. I liken the ‘vibes’ of Cairn’s journey to be meditative and considered as Death Stranding felt, and mechanically specific and thematically strange in gameplay to feel like Baby Steps. Both games really feel like they belong in this wheelhouse: they are both experiential games where their mechanics and themes push you as a player to engage with them on their terms, and reward your hard work with small, emphatic victories both narratively and mechanically. Cairn fits neatly into this family of games. It shares the DNA and ‘theses’ of both games previously stated, at its core. I think I am starting to love these types of games, prickly as they may be.

The journey, quest, or goal ultimately feels like the ‘point’ for Aava. She, as a character, is perhaps the most polarizing and interesting thing about Cairn from a narrative perspective. I’ll get into what I mean in a moment. To demonstrate this point slightly, we have to talk about the character of Marco, who is perhaps the pivot point on which the finale rests.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE ENDINGS OF CAIRN!

Marco is the first real person you meet in the story as you climb the mountain. As a character, he seems initially like the prototypical ‘fanboy’ of a normal story, but as the tale builds, more about him becomes clear. He is driven by a need to impress Aava, once he finds her climbing on the mountain, and the more he interacts with her, the misguided fanboyism makes way for a worrying realisation, where Marco sees Aava for who she is. A selfish person, driven by either greed, isolation, or depression, and seeking the summit to ultimately die. It’s a sobering reality when faced with it, and Marco responds accordingly. Initially, it just seems like Aava is climbing to get away from it all, but as the journey lengthens and the two continue to bump into each other on the adventure, Marco identifies the core obsession Aava has in attempting to solve the obstacle before her.

The more time he spends with her, the more he becomes worried on her behalf, seeing just how this dangerous obsession with summiting Kami completely takes her over. It defies sanity even. He pleads with her not to go through with it, and to go back down with him, back down the mountain to safety. This leads into one of the endings you can choose, and this ending, I believe, is somewhat of a false ending.

In it, Aava takes up Marco on his pleading to descend, and she makes it back to the base with him. Cut to a credits montage of her and Marco visiting the many mountain dwellers that they encountered along the way. Then a final segue into Aava’s mobile home, where an off-screen female (Aava’s partner) calls her into the room to reunite with all the friends she made on her ascent, including Marco. In this scene, Aava sits motionless. Hollow. Completely without purpose and empty. Even if she is safe, I think having commitments is the real purgatory for her. She is less interested in being connected with folks in her life than in accomplishing the goal she sets out for herself.

Aava and Marco’s journeys mirror each other and interweave until the penultimate ending decision you inevitably have to make. In some ways, that previous ending of the two you can choose in some way, like a false choice to me, given how I perceive Aava. She is so completely consumed and driven to succeed in her goal that achieving the summit becomes a major detriment to her very existence by the end of the game. In fact, the close calls have been so close during the trek that it could be argued that there were many times Aava didn’t just blackout thousands of feet up in the sky— she actually died in these moments, and the further adventure is a figment of her dying brain, trying to continue the ordeal past the point of her physical ability. The euphoria of the heights she reaches, or the low oxygen instead, could be the cause for the many hallucinatory moments you stumble into, in making it up a sheer cliff face, with all your bodily functions dangerously diminished from the act of climbing up impossible heights.

Every time you make it up a portion of the mountain, you get the sense this sort of endeavor shouldn’t have been attempted. At least by a sane person. Aava’s mindset is what drives the game, ultimately, and ironically, seeing her slow descent into proper madness towards her obsession is a fascinating and frustrating exercise, all told. By the end of the game, I couldn’t stand Aava. But not in a hateful way necessarily— more like in a, I am worried for her, and I am annoyed that I am enabling her in a way.

It’s the power of video games, somewhat. You enable a character to achieve their perceived agency or even your agency in the experience. It’s an odd dissonance I felt then, to see the character I cared so much about disregard every warning issued to her to recalculate her goal. It’s a journey driven by greed, selfishness, and single-minded desire to conquer what can’t be conquered. It should be empowering, I suppose— but the ties she cuts along the way, from the people who are willing to help her, make the choices she makes so frustrating to me. The fact that I am enabling her to make bad decisions is so upsetting.

I am of two minds about it. I want her to succeed in a gameplay sense because we, in some way, are sharing in the struggle of it all. But common sense being what it is, I cannot condone the particulars, given the circumstances. What it takes to accomplish this task is far too painful for me as the player to bear. I truly felt like I was the one driving Aava to her death. Which brings me to what I feel is the ‘true ending’ of Cairn.

The second choice you can pick is to ignore Marco’s pleas to descend with him and continue… past the point of sanity, as well. Upon hearing this, Marco’s gaze falls. He knows that the ascent will be Aava’s final resting place, I think. He says, “I take it I didn’t find your cure.” He knew Aava was always going to continue without him. Marco mentions how thin the air will be, the conditions worsening, and the lack of resources further up, but to no avail. He cannot convince her.

Aava makes some excuses like “It’s not your fault… It’s just who I am…,” but Marco ignores them and asks a question that feels more like reassurance to himself than reality to Aava. “Will we ever see each other again?”
To that, Aava says, “Yes.” Falsely, I believe. There is one way that the trip goes. I believe they both know it, too. It’s hopeful in a way, but I also feel like they’re both lying to each other here. It’s a conversation that carries so much substance and meaning behind it. They are both saying what they want, without saying it. Maybe I am ascribing more meaning to it? I dunno… It just felt that way. Marco then says he will be waiting for her at the bottom, and hugs her. They say farewell. It was time. Those are the truest things they say to each other directly in this moment. It is goodbye.

It makes sense that the final climb ultimately kills Aava. It should never have been attempted. The climb itself is harrowing and tense. Many times, she should have died on the way up. Her robotic companion, the one constant on your journey besides Marco, “Climbot,” dies, and you are given another choice to drag the metal husk up the rest of the way with you, or cut it and free climb the rest of the way.

I chose to keep it. Even if it didn’t end up making it either. In some way, that choice exists as the final tie she cuts to her mortal coil. Having that choice was very powerful to me. Keep the one thing that you needed on the journey more than any other, or cut it and know there is no hope. I feel like I lied to myself here. I kept Climbot because I held out a hope against hope that I could use it to get down as I had used it going up. But it wasn’t that clean a situation, unfortunately.

This ending feels the most in keeping with Aava as a character. She reaches the summit. She screams… in sheer exhaustion and triumph, both. This is when I started crying. The entire climb then hit me all at once, and I put the controller down. From there… Aava falls asleep… and dies. She then ‘wakes up’ and climbs the stars above her in a sort of dream sequence to end the game. From there, it then fades out to the credits. I think I sat in silence for about 10 minutes after this ending. It feels like the true ending because Aava achieves her goal, but dies in the process. She ‘wins’ but her selfishness ultimately kills her in the end. Aava achieves the goal… but at the ultimate cost of her life.

I dunno. I kinda wanted to just talk about the ending? I found it so profoundly thought-provoking and mechanically exhausting. It’s one of the most singular endings to a game I have played in a long time.

Just… the finality of it. It was extremely sobering. I think I will be chasing how Cairn made me feel for a very long time. I am mixed in my emotions with it. I think that’s healthy. Rarely do games get so deep for me. In this way, anyway. I think it’s just so rich in detail, narrative depth, and psychological pathos. It is a very rare thing for video games to achieve what Cairn does here. It’s more than a game. It’s an examination of the human condition, both mental and physical, in a way that only a few games have attempted. It’s truly, truly special.

Cairn is a bona fide masterpiece. It’s the first great game of 2026, but I will admit, it isn’t for everyone. It can be brutal. It’s hard to balance the survival systems of the game with the difficulty of the climbing itself, but if you can conquer the obstacles that The Game Bakers have set before you, you will find an absolute triumph here.
It’s amazing.

That being said, I highly recommend this game. It will be on my top 10 this year by the time that Game of the Year rolls around again. I would be shocked if it weren’t in the top half, if not in the top 3. Guess we will have to see how this year shakes out, I guess.

As always, thanks for reading what I do, and as Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a little slice of Heaven.”