How Cairn Got An Entire Studio Climbing

And How It Might Also Get You Into It.

Cairn (noun [C]):

• a small pile of stones made, especially on mountains, to mark a place or as a memorial.

• a videogame about climbing, developed and published by The Game Bakers. Out November 5th, 2025.
  

Whether you’re on a mountain surrounded by daredevils, or on a climbing gym wall packed with fellow hobbyists, everything fades away if you climb high enough. Your mind goes blank, your worries morph into the background noise they were all along. All that remains is you and the wall.

The experience of climbing is difficult to describe to someone who’s never tried it, which is why the entire team at The Game Bakers went climbing as part of the making of Cairn, their upcoming “simulator”. Descriptions might be tough to grasp, but a game that aims to recreate the strong emotions that one gets when climbing is easier to absorb. As Emeric Thoa, the game’s Creative Director, put it:

[The goal is] to make you feel the danger when your balance is wrong, and the joy of reaching a good hold and making slow but meaningful progress.

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Climbing games are neither popular nor common. Despite the sport now being firmly inserted in the mainstream, it hasn’t translated into videogames. This intrigues me because it feels like an obvious connection. Climbing does not need to be “gamified” the way racing is with time-trials and AI racers, which made the early concept of Cairn easy:

There’s a summit to reach. You see it at the start of the game, and every step you make, every movement is progress towards it. It doesn’t need any explanation. Also, the goal of the player is the same as the character’s. It makes everything simple, relatable, and rewarding. There is a lot to explore in (Mount) Kami, which reinforces the desire to climb, but always with the idea that ”going up is progressing”.

Other projects weren't a factor for The Game Bakers, though, who were inspired by “real world climbing, rather than existing video games with climbing in them.” If you’ve played any of their previous titles, you know that they don’t settle for common. “In every new game, we try to find an outstanding idea. Something never played before”, Thoa tells me.

Cairn’s beautiful art style. Image via The Game Bakers.

Cairn is a realistic climbing simulator, but unlike the many staples of the simulation genre, it proudly boasts a stylized art direction— helmed by the talented comic book artist Mathieu Bablet. Not only does it help Cairn stand out, “it reinforces the idea that (it) is a journey into a different world.” In this fantastical setting climbers have the aid of a climbot, a spider-like smart robot which assists Aava’s every need in her climbs, and something she dearly needs in her attempt to climb the massive Mount Kami.

While the looming mountain is a fictional creation, Aava’s obsession with being the first to reach its summit is one of the most realistic aspects of the game. She’ll sacrifice her own safety in order to reach that objective, no matter the costs. Philippe Petit, the daredevil who wire-walked between the Twin Towers, 400m off the ground, said: “They called me, I didn't choose them.” Mount Kami is calling Aava, and we’re going to find out why it chose her.

If you’ve played Furi or Haven, you might notice that music is much sparser in Cairn, although it still has a star-studded roster of artists crafting its soundtrack— Gildaa,Martin Stig Andersen, and Toxic Avenger. That’s because the game aims to transmit Aava’s feelings through the experience. This is partially achieved by letting players “focus on the breathing or simply enjoy the wind and the mountain soundscape.”, but in the right moments music is used to create strong memories and to reinforce beautiful or tense situations.

Crafting a realistic depiction of such a unique activity requires an unusual approach. The team worked with “Loan Giroud, a Chamonix mountain guide” and “Elisabeth Revol, an Alpinist who climbed several 8000m mountains”.

Aava and her climbot. GIF via The Game Bakers.

Trained climbers who’ve playtested the game describe it as “very realistic”, and that was achieved because The Game Bakers themselves got a taste of it. Not only did they learn a lot from working with “Loan Giroud, a Chamonix mountain guide” and “Elisabeth Revol, an Alpinist who climbed several 8000m mountains”, the entire team tried climbing.

We even went all together on a workshop in the Alps in France, in Chamonix. We did rock climbing together on outdoor cliffs, learned climbing techniques, talked to mountain guides and to Elizabeth Revol. We also did a hike, and we went up to 3840m high at Aiguille du Midi, face to face with the summit of Mont Blanc. It was a lot of fun and a lot of learnings to apply in the game (and a good deal of muscle soreness too).

Emeric Thoa didn’t think of Cairn as a “possible climbing initiation tool” when I brought it up as such, but he’ll be very happy if the game can be useful to new climbers. “More importantly, I think Cairn can be a motivation to climb. Half the team started climbing for real during development”. Maybe Cairn will get you face to face with a summit too, one day.

“It's like… There's a wall. The wall doesn't care one way or another, nobody else cares one way or another — it's just me trying to do something to see if I can.” - Alex Honnold on climbing, interview by Kaleem Aftab on The Talks.