Plenty of iconic boss fights have made their way to us through 2025 so far, but I’m here to tell you that none of them are as threatening as the concept of scrabbling up a cliff in the rain with your rumbling stomach echoing off the rocks around you. Peak has become an accidental phenomenon since its surprise release back in June, and it’s easily one of my favorite games of the year.
The premise is simple. Having crash landed on a tropical island, you need to climb to its peak, light a signal flare, and catch the helicopter back to civilization. Unfortunately, you’re a dumpy little blob of a character with dangerously wobbly ankles and a raging appetite. While your free-climbing abilities might be better than your physique would imply, it only takes one missed hold or a single hubristic climb to send you crashing into the chasm below.
Balancing act
That’s all made more difficult by the fact that several environmental factors can conspire to limit your climbing capabilities. Peak throws an interesting twist on survival game hunger meters into its mix, every moment you go without food limiting the amount of stamina you can use for a successful climb. Go too long without a bite to eat, and you’ll not only hear your stomach growling, but you won’t be able to get as far up a cliff face or as far along a hanging rope or vine. Your friends might be able to help you up the worst of the climbs, but doing so will take the whole squad extra time, meaning that everyone else gets hungrier in the process.
You may like
-
The best new game I’ve played all year is a 30-minute demo where I just climbed rocks and ate chocolate bars – and I still care about it more than Borderlands 4 and GTA 6 combined
-
“I’m gonna crash out”: Even the creators of co-op climbing game Peak are stunned by 1 million copies sold in 6 days – “Why did this stupid jam game sell more than Another Crab’s Treasure”
-
This co-op platformer was a “boyhood dream” for the self-taught stop-motion animator now directing it, and it might just rival It Takes Two with a more earnest story and action less likely to destroy your relationships
Indie Spotlight
I accidentally played 10 hours of Magic Inn and it’s already the most hands-on management sim I’ve played since Two Point Campus
And it might only get worse from there. A bad fall means you’ll get injured, the resulting stamina loss only being fixed by a med kit. Getting caught in a blizzard means you risk frostbite unless you can warm up. Eating underripe fruit to sate your hunger might leave you poisoned. Even an energy drink can make you sleepy once its initial effects wear off. Peak very quickly becomes a game of balancing your resources against your limitations, maxing out on stamina where you can and praying that the consequences of your actions don’t lead to you running out of gas as you’re trying to rope-swing across a ravine.
That’s often where your friends come in. While you can play Peak solo – and I’ve had a few pleasingly meditative climbs myself – it’s best in a group. Playing with friends means that you can carry more collective gear without being totally weighed down, which means more imaginative solutions to some of the bigger climbing problems.
Your companions can reach down to pull a struggling climber up to safety, or even help boost them towards an out-of-reach ledge. Throw in the proximity chat that has been a crucial part of Peak’s viral popularity, and you’ve got a system that all-but forces you to work together, dialing up the tragedy when a friend can’t quite make the last gasp towards your outstretched hand and falls tumbling into the mist below, their screams echoing vainly as they fall out of earshot.
Peak can be deeply silly, and joint developers Landfall and Aggro Crab are certainly not afraid to lean into that, with giant lollipops, blow darts, and literal banana peel pratfalls all heightening the comedy, especially in the lower regions of the island. But once you’ve made it through the slippery Tropics biome and into the more dangerous Alpine and Caldera regions beyond, Peak starts to get serious.