Meanwhile the fluid action of reaching, gripping, and then lifting yourself is hugely immersive, although the lack of a physical body in the game does occasionally make it feel like you’re pulling the wall down rather than pulling yourself up.Īnother unavoidable downside of The Climb is that you spend most of your time with your nose pressed against a virtual wall, which doesn’t make for the most interesting of sights. Because you’re mostly climbing upwards, you don’t need to worry too much about having a huge physical play space. The Climb makes great use of the power of VR while deftly navigating most of its limitations. The result is a highly physical puzzle game wherein you must use not just your hands but also your head and neck to navigate around the rock faces that the game tasks you with ascending. Obviously you have to remove one hand from a hold to do this, so you need to make sure that you have sufficient stamina in your stabilising hand before letting go of the wall. What’s more, you can bolster your grip by chalking your hands, which you do by waggling your wrist rapidly until a puff of chalk coats your virtual palm. Clinging onto a surface with both hands will refill those meters. As you climb both of these grip meters will gradually drain, and if they reach zero you’ll lose your grip and fall. Both your hands have a grip meter represented where your wrist should be. To scale walls in The Climb, you use the touch controllers to reach out with your virtual hands (which are disembodied and float around in a slightly alarming manner), pressing the grip buttons to clutch the natural handholds worn into the rock-face. Instead, you play through a sequence of increasingly challenging climbing stages in three separate environments, ranging from a giant standing rock in the middle of a tropical bay, to the freezing summits of the Alps. Structurally, The Climb has more in common with a racing sim than, say, an action game. As the title suggests it’s a climbing simulator, one that sees you scaling various walls, mountains, and cliff-sides in a range of locations rendered with typical flair by Crytek’s mighty CryEngine tech. Nonetheless, today The Climb offers an experience that you simply cannot get in conventional gaming.
It’s also probably the best game that Crytek has ever made, although it only came into its own when Oculus released its touch controllers after The Climb had already launched. Despite being almost two years old, The Climb remains one of the most unique and intelligent uses for VR technology.