The scientific community is still trying to work out what my body was made for, but it sure as hell isn’t climbing. An awkward experience with some crampons and a harness convinced me at a young age that I wasn’t built to free solo my way through life, and that conclusion has never steered me wrong in the decades since.
Consider me surprised and suspicious, then, that I’ve gotten really into the demo for White Knuckle, a grimy, minimalist, industrial game about clambering out of what-looks-like-an-Oddworld-level at high speed.
The premise is simple: you are some guy that the good Lord has equipped with two hands and an overwhelming desire to be somewhere other than where you begin. Off you go, hurtling upwards from handhold to handhold using mechanics that are complex enough to feel rewarding when you nail it but simple enough that you don’t trip over yourself (too much). Every 50 metres the game simultaneously pats you on the back and warns you of your hubris with a message about how high you’ve climbed.
In the best tradition of games in this vein—the ‘ah geez I screwed up and annihilated all my progress’ genre—everything is a balancing act. You want to ascend quickly but you need to plan a reasonable route and not deplete your stamina (each hand has its own internal meter, and blazes angry red when you’re about to overtax them), you want to help yourself out by using pitons and other deployable handholds, but you don’t want to use them all before finding yourself face-to-face with a featureless, sheer cliff. That kind of thing.
But what really does it for me is the style. White Knuckle has a kind of Buckshot Roulette aesthetic approach to the climbing sim. Everything is sheet metal and rust at PS1-angles. Radios you find on your ascent warble odd, unparseable tunes. You can get a quick hit of stamina by eating the contents of unmarked tin cans and one of your most valuable tools is the long stick of rebar, which you can hurl like a centurion’s javelin into concrete to give you a new thing to hang from.
It’s sinister and nasty in a way I find appealing, like you’re escaping the periphery of some distant, decadent society by making use of the detritus it casts off. But also, it’s just a solid, addictive climber. The kind of thing that’ll have you cursing yourself as you fall and shear off tens of metres of progress before gritting your teeth and steeling yourself to continue. It’s well worth your time, even if—like me—you’re generally not one for climbing either in the virtual or physical world. You can find its demo on Steam.
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