The idea of zen originally comes from meditation, but it is a word that can be suitably applied to a variety of games -Journey,A Short Hike, and, from my own personal experience, titles likeMinecraftandStardew Valley, depending on how you approach them. In these games you often enter a state of cognizant but zoned-out bliss. That’s a bit of a contradiction, but it’s something I usually more informally call ‘Lego talk’, wherein two people play Lego and their minds wander and their brains keep functioning, but often you chat absolute nonsense. It’s not that the games aren’t challenging, or that they don’t present interesting ideas or puzzles, but the general feeling is designed to make you calm, relaxed, and peaceful.
Two games I played back-to-back at the Don’t Nod booth at Gamescom, Jusant and Koira, are exactly that. Jusant is a climbing puzzle game, and Koira is a peaceful adventure about a character and their faithful pup wandering through an enchanted forest.
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Jusant has one of the most interesting and satisfyingly simple climbing mechanics I’ve ever seen in a game, at least games that don’t set out to be a definitive climbing simulator. I’m not a climber. I have climbed, every now and then, or what we usually call ‘scrambled’ in the UK, but I have friends that absolutely adore it. Many of them talk about the zen-like experience of figuring out a particular route up a sheer face of craggy rock, or brightly coloured hand-holds in a climbing centre. It’s a meditative experience—apparently. I think I’d be more worried about falling to my death.
Thankfully, Jusant presents climbing in a way that can be enjoyed from a comfy chair. You’ve got a rope and pitons, those small metal loops that you wedge into the rock to hold your rope as you ascend. You also have to manage your stamina bar, but it’s not particularly overbearing. Not in the sort of way that frustrates you, just in the way that means you do have to turn on at least some lightbulbs in your head, sometimes, to climb a cliff face. It’s smooth and silky, it feels great to swing from piton to piton, slowly climbing an impressive tower. The world changes as you climb and the music, designed specifically for the game by composer Guillaume Ferran, matches the tempo and environment.
The world of Jusant is also interesting: the spire you climb is inhabited by a society of people who’ve grown used to living vertically. I didn’t get to see much of what this might mean for puzzles and environments, but it’s an intriguing idea nonetheless. The biomes you explore as you climb also change, from deserts, to tundra, to wastes, that are slowly repopulated with nature by your little friendly assistant, creature fuzz-ball thing, called Ballast.
After Jusant, which left me feeling sort of fuzzy, I hopped onto Koira, a peaceful puzzle game about exploring a magical forest with your brand-new puppy friend. It’s typical of its genre in many ways - top-down, dense foregrounds and backgrounds, twinkling music, environmental puzzles and little secrets. you may control the pup to complete tasks for you. It’s still relatively early in development but I could see the framework of what kind of game Koira will become: another zen-like puzzle game, not meant to challenge you, but to tickle your brain a bit.
Zen games are the ideal sort of palette cleanser. Something you may pick up and play for a few hours, without much commitment, and understand what you’re getting. It’s always great to see games that step away from space and explosions to try something a little different. In a world of loud triple-A titles that demand 50 hours of intense gameplay, we all need to be more zen.
