The characters each have back stories – an adventurer looking for their next thrill, a scientist looking for proof of an infinite energy source, and a journalist looking to corroborate rumours of a mysterious island kept hidden from the world. However, this replayability is bolstered by the addition of three characters to guide, three mountains to navigate (and each mountain has three different routes to take) and three difficulty levels to tackle. The roguelike nature of Insurmountable – where no two playthroughs will be the same – lends it a natural replayability. Do you pick the choice that boosts energy, but reduces your body temperature? Or do you preserve that body temperature at the expense of the oxygen available to you? It forces you to think every step of the way, making it a more cerebral experience, in which you have to think several steps ahead.
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In some cases, you’ll be given a choice of how to react to one of these random events – at this point, the game almost plays like critically-acclaimed card-based strategy game Reigns, with the choices being largely binary and featuring some kind of trade-off. Any of those meters can fall to zero, but only that central health meter falling to zero will cause a Game Over state.Īlong the way, you will encounter random events that can boost or deplete each of those meters – this might be happening upon a dead body which you can choose to loot for better equipment, clothing or consumables (oxygen tanks, flasks of hot drinks etc) or slipping into a crevice and taking fall damage. Each ‘turn’ you make to progress along your chosen path will deplete a percentage of the five bars that represent your physical and mental state – there is a sanity meter, an energy meter, an oxygen meter, a body temperature meter and a central health meter. Each mountain is represented by a 3D map of recognisably rocky terrain that acts as untraversable scenery and a randomly generated hexagonal grid which serves as your path. Insurmountable’s USP presents itself in the form of essentially a turn-based strategy game with resource management mechanics running through, in which every decision you make along the way will have some effect – both good and bad – on the next part of your journey.
The long answer is yes, but there are some caveats.
Would it offer something different enough to reignite my interest in the genre as a whole? So, when I learned of the existence of Insurmountable, a roguelike mountain climbing game, my interest was immediately piqued. I have, by and large, had my fill with roguelikes, partly because so many of them fall into the same genres these days – they’re either top-down shooting and/or exploration games (in the mould of The Binding of Isaac and Enter The Gungeon) or brutally difficult and combat-heavy 2D platformers (such as Dead Cells and Narita Boy).
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