Alternatively, imagine Into the Breach tilted by 90 degrees
Seldom has the phrase "balance your party" carved deeper clawmarks into my soul than when playing Ascenders: Beyond the Peak, a turn-based cosmic horror RPG in which you guide groups of alpinists up cursed mountains in search of terrible artefacts. Each level is a grid-based cliff face made up of slippery ledges, crumbling overhangs, unearthly varmints such as giant spiders, and resource caches such as the rucksacks of mountaineers who came before.
Your three characters are roped together, which both supports and constrains movement. If you want your explosive-toting Sapper to reach the berry bushes peeking from the frozen stalactites, you'll need to shuffle your burly Highlander over to create some slack. Given a sturdy place to stand, one character can haul another to their position, saving you movement points. But being joined together is also, obviously, a recipe for tragic sacrifices, willing or otherwise. Sooner or later, whether due to a dislodged boulder or a pouncing predator or sheer exhaustion, one of your rockjocks will take a tumble, and then you'll have to decide whether to cut the rope.
The game's demo, out now on Steam, paints a promising/harrowing picture of a game that combines the shadow-scoured, death-by-slow-inches vibe of Darkest Dungeon with the time-constrained tactical puzzling of Into The Breach. As in both those previous games, the longer you spend struggling up each section of the mountain, the more desperate your plight becomes.
Your characters have finite stamina, and lose a point for every turn they spend hanging from their climbing axes, though they can replenish it by settling on ledges. You also have to worry about rapidly failing daylight; the crevices are harder to navigate after dark. But you do need to dally a little in search of campfire fuel and food, because your characters will lose a point of maximum stamina and develop other negative conditions if they aren't able to rest and eat up between clambers. You also, ideally, need resources for crafting, with items including a telescope to disperse the fog of war, or pitons that allow party members to use each other as platforms.
Whether you reach the summit or are forced to turn back halfway, each Ascenders run takes its toll on survivors. They'll sprout positive and negative traits, comparable to Darkest Dungeon's quirks, which obliges you to make some trade-offs – a good Cook is an asset, less so if they're also an Arachnophobe. The nine character classes seem well-defined, with branching upgrades allowing you to tailor them further. The Highlander has bags of stamina, anchoring the other, nimbler classes. The Scout has a grapple they can use to speedily relocate, and the Sapper is good at blowing away obstacles.
There are also branching story questlets that compare to the experience of discovering some highly dubious object in Darkest and deciding whether to stick your hand in. During my last attempt, I took a risk on searching for a base camp my Scout swore she'd spotted through the tempest. We found the camp, which harboured some precious tins of beans, but then, my Highlander got himself all chewed up by a giant spider during an overnight encounter.
I'm hoping that things will get weirder and more deranging with altitude, as promised by the trailers. There is talk of the mountain being alive; I want to hear it talking in its sleep. I want to scuttle out over a ridge of curiously mosaicked ice and realise that I'm traversing an enormous retina. The art direction is definitely quarrying an over-familiar nook, but I enjoyed the dirging soundtrack, which sways from note to note like the wind industriously seeking to prise your fingers loose.
I do worry that Ascenders is a bit too digestible, at the cost of suspense; as with battles in Into the Breach, many climbs are completed in moments. Still, I'm mostly describing the foothills; you'll face a dozen or more individual scrambles in the course of each run, and I can imagine later sections lasting tens of minutes as I agonise over my turns, trying to save an unsaveable team from disaster. Read more and try the demo yourself on Steam.