The Climb (video game)

The Climb
Developer(s)	Crytek
Publisher(s)	Crytek
Engine	CryEngine
Platform(s)	Windows, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 2
Release	PC: April 28, 2016 (2016-04-28) Oculus Quest: December 3, 2019 (2019-12-03)
Genre(s)	Platform

The Climb is a first-person virtual reality game, developed by Crytek and Oculus Studios. In it the player climbs cliffs in locations around the world. The game released for Microsoft Windows on April 28, 2016, while a Oculus Quest port was later released in 2019.

Gameplay

The player starts out in a tutorial area, where they can choose what they look like and practice the game's climbing mechanics. The player climbs using the motion controllers, moving their hands to grab the next ledge. If the player reaches a gap too big to the climb across, they can push off of the ledge to jump across. To keep holding on, the player needs to chalk their hands to maintain grip, which they can do by holding a button and shaking the controller.

The game features three different environments: Bay, Canyon, and Alps. Each of these contains five levels which are: Easy, Medium, and Hard, alongside two bouldering maps. These environments contain different hazards, from poison grips that drain your stamina, to small ledges where you have to hold the grip partway to hold on. The player can also encounter ledges covered by rocks, which they need to brush off with the controller before grabbing it. The Climb additionally has an endless mode, that randomly generates sections for the player to climb.

Development

The Climb started development as a demo called Return to Dinosaur Island. They first built the demo in a cave, before moving it onto a cliff. After discovering the performance was still good while looking at landscapes from the cliff, they started to develop a game around the view. A developer said, "And even there, at the top of a cliff, everything was running smoothly. Looking out over the vistas, the render calls were all good, we’re getting 90 frames per second, sub 20 millisecond response times. So now we’ve got the epic beautiful vistas, how do we do something fun in that experience?”.

Reception

Reception

Aggregate score

Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	71/100

Review scores

Publication	Score
Destructoid	8/10
Edge	6/10
Game Informer	5.75/10

The Climb received "mixed or average reviews” according to Metacritic.

Destructoid praised the visuals of The Climb, writing that “The commitment to a 60fps (90 for Climb) minimum frame rate and the power of the latest CryEngine build really helps suck you in”. Rock Paper Shotgun liked how the game made the player feel like they were climbing, feeling that "It’s the strangest thing: I barely move but I feel sweaty and achey after reaching a summit.” While Game Informer's Kyle Hilliard enjoyed some of the mechanics of the game, he felt that playing the game for extended sessions could tire the player’s neck. He wrote, "Leaning and stretching your neck to progress is necessary, even in the early climbs, and it became tiresome quickly. It added to the tension on my head and neck, which could be a problem for people already prone to discomfort in VR.”