THE MAKING OF . . .
JUSANT
How the Life Is Strange team traded time travel for mountain climbing
By Christian Donlan
Format
PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Developer/publisher Don’t Nod
Origin France
Release 2023
Astonishingly, nobody on the team that developed Jusant had much experience of rock climbing in the real world
How long is a piece of rope? In Jusant, the measurement is precise: a piece of rope is 40 metres long, and that’s a crucial statistic for this most careful and convincing of climbing games.
In Jusant, you must reach the top of a tower. It’s science fiction, so the tower is impossibly tall, and yoked to it is a story about an alien world that has long since run out of water. But the climbing is played entirely straight. With its pitons and relays, it wouldn’t be out of place in a book by Chris Bonington. This means that 40 metres is more than just an interesting number. In Jusant, it’s a boundary.
And it’s also part of a character, because, in a relatively lonely game, one in which it’s often just you and the environment, your climbing rope amounts to a genuine companion. Sure, you carry a watery pet in your backpack and they pop out during cutscenes, but it’s the rope you rely on moment to moment that you really develop a relationship with. Fortunately, Jusant’s rope is an entirely convincing presence. You can use it to ascend rock faces and place hardware for wall-runs, and the rope also reacts appropriately when the climb has gone wrong. Tangle it around an outcrop of stone, for example, and you get a realistic snarl of useless line. Catch yourself in it and it can bind your clumsy arms or legs a little.
According to Edouard Caplain, Jusant’s art director, implementing the rope was one of the project’s biggest challenges. “I mean, it was a real subject from the beginning to the end. Our technical director spent hours, hours, hours on the rope, just to make it work. Because, in the beginning, it was nonsense. Many games fail to do [ropes] nicely, because it takes so long.” He sighs at the very thought of it all. “I mean, this was a huge, huge part of Jusant. A huge part of the development, anyway.”