Jurant is an action puzzle indie game where you control your character to climb up a mountain that was once home to a lost civilization. You’ll have to solve ways to get around and find ways to climb up but along the way, your strange companion who’s been sleeping part-of-the-way, will help guide you to climb further up. There’s a mystery that surrounds this little guy but its powers are indeed helpful.
When first starting, the game starts at the lower part of the tower and gives short tutorial tips on how-to climb. Your rope can latch to key components that are placed at key areas that help guide you where to go next. However, you can add additional spots anywhere on the wall to help your climb. This is helpful if you accidentally drop or misjumped to a new section to climb. At first, it took some time to figure out the control setup but about 8% into the game, the controls started to become more comfortable.
The one drawback the game could have done better with its controls is the ability to reset the game’s camera. There’s an instance where the camera focused too much on a point on where the player’s need to latch their rope to, it made climbing difficult if you happen to fall too far down, making the camera unreliable. To get around this, resetting to the last save point was the only option to fix this. Playing on the PlayStation 5, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualSense’s adaptive triggers when climbing or when latching your rope.
About 10% into the game, your companion begins to aid your climbing by a couple ways. The first is it will focus the camera where you should start climbing next, a helpful tool that could have been available at the beginning of the game for newcomers. The second is the ability to make plants nearby to blossom to help give your climber more ways to climb up such as grabbing on the plant’s thorns.
There isn’t any dialogue in the game’s story as the only interaction you’ll encounter are letters spread across the tower. Each one tells a story of the past but it doesn’t seem to explain why you are climbing in the first place or about your partner either.
Regardless of no human interaction, Jusant is a surprising, interactive puzzle game that lets players focus on problem-solving to climb without any other distraction. If you’re looking for a laid-back, action-puzzle-solving game, Jusant maybe the game to play next.
Jusant available on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC (Steam). For more information, players can visit the game’s official website.