Cairn's Story Is A Mess

Alternate title: Girls Would Rather Free Solo Than Go To Therapy

So indie darling Cairn has been making a splash lately, and it's hard to undersell its brilliance. It's a mountain climbing game. More than that though, it's a game of gruelling persistence in the face of seemingly impossible challenge. Its blend of deceptively simple controls and well-executed movement that evolves just enough to keep demanding the player's focus right to the end comes together with a gorgeous artstyle and captivating world to create an experience that truly attempts to capture the exhilaration of being on the wall.

If you've not played it or aren't interested in playing it, Cairn is the story of Aava, a woman who is a singularly accomplished free climber who has decided to take on the ultimate challenge: a solo climb of the mountain known as Kami, a summit which has never been reached even by entire teams of climbers in the past. The game's name, even, is a term for a pile of stones used to memorialise the dead, and you'll come across plenty of these memorials as you climb the unforgiving summit.

Free climbing is the practice of climbing rock faces and other natural formations (known as 'routes') using only hands and feet, usually wearing a harness attached to a rope in case of a fall (often called a 'swing' by climbers). This is opposed to free solo climbing, where your equipment is limited to chalk and climbing shoes, even on routes where a fall would be fatal. Bouldering is like free solo climbing but on routes (or 'problems') where falls are survivable - the name coming from the fact that a lot of bouldering problems involve climbing boulders rather than large formations such as mountain faces. Bafflingly, bouldering is the more recent of these disciplines, developing out of the training methods of mountaineers and climbers to prepare for more dangerous routes.

Cairn does not set out to be a simulator per se, but it presents in loving detail the feel of free climbing in a way no other game has captured in the past. You move your hands and feet with the analogue stick and press a button to secure them in faults and cracks or on ledges and other protrusions. It tracks the weight distribution across your limbs and drains or recovers stamina based on the size and stability of a given hold and how much weight Aava is currently suspending from that limb. It comes together into a tense and technical experience of careful judgement and occasional panicked scrambling for a secure hold before your aching, shaking muscles give out and you fall from the wall and are left swinging by your harness, cursing the choices that brought you to this point. You have full control over when you place your anchor points for your safety rope and, fortunately, you have a companion robot who is both your belayer (the person who arrests your fall when you take a swing while rope climbing) and the one who goes and retrieves all your anchors from the rock face once you've reached the top of an ascent.

All of this is to say that Cairn is mechanically an absolute joy to play and one of those games that deserves the hype. Combined with the fact that Kami is a painstakingly crafted world full of secrets and wonder and you might feel yourself tempted to stay on the wall forever.

Unfortunately, this is just the problem I have with the game. I'm going to be talking in extensive detail about its story and especially its ending, so strap in for spoilers. Also strap in for extensive discussion of suicidal ideation; if that's going to trigger you, probably best to skip this one.

Aava sets out on this journey with no intention of surviving it. This is made abundantly clear to you at every moment. She sets off on this journey with barely a word to the people who care about her, she's almost euphoric about the fact that nobody knows where she is, she is actively hostile to intrusions on her focus from her life on the ground, and she is cavalier about how lightly she's packed for a climb that has proven impossible to those before her - including for the people who lived on the mountain and regularly and ritually attempted to reach the summit, but we'll talk about them later. In short, Aava behaves like someone who is moments away from executing a plan to kill themselves.

There's nothing really wrong with this as a story. Thematically it can be interesting to explore the mindset of someone who intends to conquer a challenge or die trying. Aava's nihilistic acceptance that there is only the mountain contrasts with the attitude of Marco, another character you meet on the wall, who still has his joie-de-vivre and is just climbing to see how far he can get before he goes back home like everyone else. Of course, Marco isn't real and when he eats a bullet later in the story when you decide to push onto the summit, it's meant to be more of a metaphorical death of Aava's last chance at going back to a life on the ground. The mountain demands sacrifices.

Except... the game itself disagrees with this ethos. Or maybe it doesn't. It's really hard to tell. There's some elements of trying to let the player draw their own conclusions, but it's hard to figure out what the game actually wants to say when it contradicts itself as badly as it does.

To explore this let's look at role of the mountain itself in the story. Basic media literacy tells us that mountains can be allegories for difficult obstacles in life, for stalwart resistance to change even against the forces of time, for the hardships of isolation, or for proximity to divinity. Cairn wants Kami to be all of these. As written, they end up at odds with each other quite often, however.

Aava, for example, in her climb, is stubbornly resisting change. She comes across in the game as a deeply broken person, someone who was raised from a very early age to be a climber, her father living vicariously through her. When she instructs Marco through a part of the climb he's struggling with she is extremely harsh and critical of him, clearly reflecting the way she was treated. She stops just short of calling him a failure. She tells him he'll find his 'rage' to continue onwards - a very strange turn of phrase that most climbers generally wouldn't use, and that he comments he's never experienced. Aava doesn't even realise how badly she's been traumatised by her childhood and inadvertently tries to pass it onto the next generation. When pressed on why she climbs, she has no good answers other than that she feels free. That climbing is the one thing in her life she can control. Aava would rather climb the wall than go to therapy, in other words. Kami represents her struggle with her mental health, but is also the way that she is escaping it. There can be no positive outcome to continuing to climb while this contradiction exists.

On the other side of the coin, there was a long-standing society of people who lived on Kami that the game refers to as the 'troglodytes' (it's unclear if this was their own name for themselves or some kind of weird racist name given to them by outsiders). You spend most of the game exploring the ruins of their society in awe and wonder. They spent their lives in unity with the mountain, worshipping it as a deity, forever trying to reach its summit just as Aava is. You explore their coming of age rites, learn their burial rituals, meet their stone-carved Guardians, even have an opportunity to be blessed by the other villages in the area that aren't yet abandoned. Because you see the troglodytes aren't some ancient tribal people that died out. The reason the mountain is abandoned is that sometime around a decade prior to Aava's ascent, the troglodytes of the Kami village chose to descend from the mountain and join the rest of humanity. They decided that the harsh isolation of Kami was no longer worth it for their society, and went back down to join the people at the foot of the mountain. They changed. And while there is loss and grief presented in this choice there are also benefits. A new life to be found.

While the game is often at odds with itself on what it wants Kami to be a metaphor for, these contradictions if anything serve to weave a very strong thread in the story that Kami is not actually meant to be climbed. That as beautiful and captivating as it is, as full of wonder, you cannot live forever on the wall. That attempting the summit is the last thing anyone ever does because... well, it's a way of ending things on your own terms. That to descend the mountain is to choose complicated, messy, difficult life. That to ascend Kami is a form of isolation as self-destruction. This is reinforced at every turn by Aava's own choices to isolate herself, push people away any time anyone tries to connect with her. Including Naomi, the only person from her life on the ground who seems to genuinely love her (I am assuming for the sake of this writing that Naomi is Aava's wife because I find that more interesting, but it's not actually made clear in the story and the way it's written would still make sense if they were sisters). When Naomi laments the death of Capsule, their 9 year old cat, Aava's response is to tear off the communications aerial of her companion robot, disconnecting herself entirely from any contact from the world outside the mountain. When Marco launches into a several minute monologue trying to connect with someone who he idolises as a climber and who inspired him to get into the discipline in the first place, you are given a prompt to tell him to shut up. If you start climbing during his monologue you will also tell him to shut up. As far as I can tell there is no way not to be rude to him - because isolation is the only choice Aava will make, left to her own devices. In this way, Aava's ascent of Kami becomes a metaphor for the distance she keeps between herself and the rest of humanity - a distance she seeks to continually increase.

Once again there's nothing wrong with this thematically as a story. If you commit to it. But then you come to the end of the game and it gets a bit... confused. As mentioned, Marco is betrayed and shot by a third character as a sacrifice to the mountain (and the person who shot him is implied to also kill himself, stuck in a perpetual state of indecision where he is unable to make the climb to the top, but cannot descend from the mountain and admit failure). Aava soon after begins a suicide march to the summit, delirious from hypoxia (because again, she did not bring oxygen because she never intended to survive this). Her companion robot shuts down due to the extreme altitude and weather conditions, and in the same rage that keeps her climbing she destroys it. You are given a choice as a player to drag the smoking wreck to the summit hanging from your harness or cut it loose and keep climbing unencumbered. This is all fine. It maintains the thread that the mountain was never meant to be climbed. It puts the final choice of whether to complete Aava's isolation or maintain one last lifeline to the rest of the world in the player's hands, while making the burden she finds that attachment quite literal. All good video game stuff.

Or it would be, except... when you drag your dying body to the summit, cradling the wreck of Climbot in your arms, you're given a prompt. Press X to "Be part of a whole". This begins Aava's triumphant ascent to the stars to join the spirits of the troglodytes who devoted themselves to the mountain while her body dies a sad and lonely death of hypoxia and hypothermia on a summit nobody will ever know she achieved. Roll credits. And at the end of the credits:

"Thank you for playing.

What is your summit?"

This and the prompt before it actually kind of sickened me to read. The entire theme of the game is that this summit shouldn't be climbed. The entire message is that Aava already had her chance to be part of a whole. She ran from it to die on a mountain where she felt in control, instead of accepting that being part of a whole sometimes means we don't have control. But instead of embracing this, the game asks, "hey, player, what are you willing to kill yourself with to avoid your problems?" It feels very crass and poorly thought through. Aava is explicitly not on the mountain to find meaning. She's there because she knows nothing else. It's not evident that she struggles to find community or connection - she gets along with people quite well when she isn't deliberately pushing them away, and has a spouse who seems to genuinely love her. It's rather presented that she is someone who is broken and burnt out from the weight of expectation, one she's carried from a very young age. In climbing Kami she chooses the false freedom of death. This doesn't feel like a choice worth the triumphant celebration that the game gives it. It feels confusing. It'd be like if at the end of Celeste, instead of coming out as a girl you very triumphantly bite down on a shotgun and paint the wall with your pixel brains while the credits ask what is worth fighting to protect.

Speaking of, the reasons Celeste works are in many ways exactly the reasons Cairn doesn't. In life, the far more interesting story for most people is what happens on the other side of Kami. What happens when we come down from our heights of isolation and rage and self-destruction. When we accept that self-inflicted suffering isn't more preferable to other kinds just because we can control it. What life can become when we choose to find meaning even when we're not in control. What it means to confront our trauma and choose healing. Celeste is the beginning of a story, not the end of one. In Cairn, you are given the choice to descend the mountain with Marco, before he is executed. You even get an ending for it. Except this ending implies that Aava continues to dream of the mountain. The game allows you to go back to your previous save and keep climbing. Only once you reach the summit is your save locked out. This carries a mechanical and narrative implication that Aava will return to the mountain until it kills her.

I don't believe Aava's vainglorious death march is the story worth telling. If I were to tell any story from her aggressive avoidance of therapy it would be the story of people like Naomi, left behind to live and grieve in the wake of her disappearance. Presenting Aava's elaborate ritual suicide as a triumphant success at finally finding where she belongs is, frankly, kinda gross and made me feel retroactively a bit ill about playing through the game. Doubly so because I managed to trigger a rare scene at the peak where it's implied that I, the player, am the one driving her forwards even when she wants to stop. This isn't really supported by the story or the gameplay. Mechanically, if anything, the player is Aava's sense of self-preservation. You force her to forage, feed herself, connect with people, get up and keep moving forward even when it seems pointless. It's only when control is taken away from the player that Aava makes self-destructive choices. The ending creates many intersections of dissonance in the story and gameplay, and while I loved the entire experience up until that point, the ending genuinely felt so poorly executed that it managed to tinge that whole experience with a bitter note.

I'd have much preferred a more muted, poignant ending that treated Aava's solipsistic drive to achieve the summit as the tragic, selfish and deeply unhealthy act that it is, not some kind of laudable spiritual pursuit. It would have maintained the feeling of everything up to that point and not compromised what it felt like the game was trying to say. And for the credits to ask what my 'summit' is, for the game to ask what it is that I would pursue at the expense of anyone who cared about my wellbeing, was a sickening icing on an otherwise very tasty cake.