Jusant is a peaceful puzzle game in which you will scale mountains.
What Is It? Jusant is a puzzle game wrapped in a climbing theme. The left and right triggers control your left and right hands, you alternate them to scale mountains. Your journey is an attempt to bring water back to a dried up land.
Jusant’s story is light and told mostly through items scattered throughout the game. As an unnamed traveler you will, optionally, read various notes and conversations found along your way, but for the most part the game is just you, a cuddly companion, and the mountain.
As mentioned, the triggers control your arms and you alternate them to scale various grab-able spots on walls. There is a very satisfying, zen-like experience to be had when you are climbing straight up and can gently alternate the triggers while holding the left stick up to quickly scale a straightforward section.
This all sounds pretty simple, but the game does add some layers as it moves along its fourish hour, six chapter runtime. You will encounter rock-like bugs whom you can grab and ride along. Your companion, Ballast, can entice local wildlife to grow with a small howl which opens up some fun puzzles to solve. You also have a stamina bar to deal with, with certain actions draining recoverable stamina while others use stamina you can’t replace without fully resting.
By the middle of the game you will need to concern yourself with the puzzle of figuring out how to get up a large climbing section. This will likely include multiple of the following: monitoring stamina usage, speeding through a section before it wilts away in the sun, creating a swing point to reach a far-away spot, jumping to reach a hold, stopping at a mid-climb rest point to fully refill your stamina, and others. For a game strictly about climbing mountains, there is a nice amount of variety in the gameplay here.
The game has a nice art style. Not super unique, but it does look good. The majority of the game takes place in non-descript reddish, brown mountain terrain. There are small settlements along the mountain to break up the monotony. The change of pace in the last few chapters plays well to break things up with a decidedly different look. There is nothing in the way of boss fights or combat of any sort; it is simply you against the mountain.
The Best Part: The loveable amount of jank in this game. As someone who regularly plays PlayStation 1 games in 2025, I appreciate a bad control scheme and some occasional, or even frequent, jank that can come in the 3D video game space. Thankfully, the controls in Jusant are quite nice and the jank is very minor. When it does happen, however, it is more fun than rage-inducing. You will never fall farther than your last anchor point, so when you miss a jump, the swinging gets a little wonky, or something else that might have been cleaned up with a bit more polish shows up, you can laugh about it and try again. This is a serious positive in my book as I appreciate when games aren’t fully pixel perfect and still show a few rough edges, provided they don’t interfere with my enjoyment.
The Worst Part: Jusant is a puzzle game at heart. I enjoyed the puzzles when I was trying to figure out how to navigate a certain wall or area. I very much did not enjoy the times I got lost on some side areas and had no idea where I was supposed to start climbing next. Ballast has an ability to point you in the right direction, but this points in a straight line, often directly into walls, making it less useful than I would hope. These did not happen very often, but they were annoyances when they did show up.
The Verdict: Jusant is a nice way to spend a few hours. It’s certainly way different than most anything else out there. It looks nice, is well made, and makes climbing mountains fun. The puzzles it offers are fun but never frustrating. The climbing challenge is mostly laid back, with a few more difficult parts, but the penalty for a wrong jump or missed grab is generally so small that you won’t get frustrated having to retry a few times.
There isn’t anything groundbreaking here, but if you want a fun, light, puzzle challenge, you can do a lot worse than Jusant.
How to Play: PlayStation 5*, Xbox Series, PC
*console played on for this review
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