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Good game. Surprised me how deep it is. It's a bit of a roguelite, and kind of like playing the Go games like Hitman, and Tombraider, and even some Deathloop type features. The game opens up quite a bit once you climb to a couple of places. The whole game can be played on your mouse only. Lots of side options like caves to sleep in or explore, and strange people and events to happen upon.
Strangest thing about this game though is how this person decided to start the climb with only very limited equipment or skills. However there are plenty of opportunities along the way to learn, and gain better equipment, and skills.
The good: It's cheap and I didn't encounter any bugs. Apart from that, not much, in my opinion. I guess there's a niche out there for text-based roguelikes, but I'm definitely not part of it.
The bad:
- Fun-ish for about 3 hours, in which you see all there is to see in this game apart from some story dialogue. It's very, very repetitive.
- The normal difficuly is ridiculously easy, although the game describes it as "challenging" and you can't change it after you start. This is the first roguelike in which I haven't died a single time in 5 hours (after which I stopped playing it), and I wasnt' even ever close to it. You really have to try hard to kill yourself. The game is like "An avalanche is coming straight at you, would you like to avoid it or stand still?" and you're like "I'll stand still, thank you." and you only lose like 5-10% of your health or only get a temporary debuff.
- The walking animation is unskippable, you can only speed it up, and at maximum speed you will spend 75%+ of the game just watching your character walk and climb long distances after you told it where to go, which is beyond boring.
- The story is minimal, vague and uninteresting and in no way makes up for the unchallenging, repetitive gameplay.
I love the game (and dont understand some other opinions)
I play on hard level and it's pretty challenging. Climbed my first mountain and almost died descending. Actually, on every mission you need to be quick on time because with one big ascent you can loose all your provisions etc.
What I like about the game:
- nice graphics
- good climbnig simulation - well balanced between body temperature, energy, sanity, oxygen
- challenging - you can't wander around, if you loose to much time/energy on wrong direction, there's no way you reach the peak (or you will and not come down)
- changing weather makes it more interesting
The only thing I would add are dialogues (you just read them, or skip them). But obviously the budget for the game is not that huge. On watching your climber walking - you can speed it up. On not seeing the whole mountain - I think its a good thing because it adds to realism. You see a lot only when you are high - at the peak for instance. When you are in a valley, or at night you see little - I take it as a plus.
To sum up - great value for money, especially if you like mountain climbing (and buy it on discount :-)
To someone who has no idea what this game is like, the best way I can describe it is that it bares some resemblance to 'This War of Mine', in the sense that you have to stay alive and reach different checkpoints on a mountain while various things are gradually depleting your character's different stats.
Whilst the premise sounds very basic (it's pretty much a case of getting from A to B to C most of the time), there are tons of different random events dotted around each mountain's hexidecimal layout, and these different events will either help or hinder you. For example you might explore a cave and find some useful equipment, or on the other hand you may come across strangers who don't take kindly to you and end up affecting your stats negatively.
The events are quite varied and interesting for the first few hours of gameplay, but then you will just keep seeing the same ones over and over eventually, which does make it a lot more repetitive.
I also feel like the game is a bit conflicted in the approach it's trying to take. Like is it going for realism or not? In some senses it feels like it is, but then the story is anything but realistic, and some of the events just don't affect your character the way it feels like they should (e.g. you can get hit by a huge boulder and lose less than 10% of your health).
I also do not understand why there's no hunger stat in Insurmountable; there's energy, body temperature, sanity, and oxygen meters but no hunger. This makes no sense and as a result, you can spend days on a mountain without eating anything and your character won't mind.
The game is reasonably challenging -if- you set the difficulty to the highest one (Insurmountable). If you're playing on anything other than that, the game is just ridiculously easy once you know what you're doing.
Overall it's an interesting survival game, but one I'm glad I got for free. I think most people will struggle to remain interested for more than 5-10 hours.
If you're the kind of person which first choose a game in normal, and then increase the difficulty, here you can't. I recommend really to choose not normal if you're used to game slightly challenging, no need to be hardcore gamer.
On the game itself, good concept, mitigated realisation.
The planning walk and hike is very nice, with anticipation on your ressources. Basically, if you go straight, it's maybe faster but you will loose way more energy, as if you plan an alternative route with less climbing difference.
The level and XP system may sometimes trigger a run to side event to collect XP and items instead of focusing on the best route, because a leveled character is way stronger than a basic one.
The story is average.
I enjoyed getting lost by night in a storm and walking in the wrong direction, because everything in the screen was dark. I was disappointed that a alledly deadly avalanche is like "oh you lost 10% of HP".
Level are different in the sense they challenge one or two ressources more than the other, and different events, but no new mechanics.
Characters when leveled up are weirdly strong (I need oxygen, let build a bottle from scratch, but very different.
The terrain is at start very hard to read, but with a few hours of play you quickly recognize a route in middle of dangerous tile.
I whish there was some kind of "endless up to your death" mode, with level one after another.
It is a good change to dungeons and space for a turn based roge-lite. The mountain can kill you (at higher level) if you don't pay attention. And that's the good in it.
