Rock climbing is an activity I can respect and marvel at, but it’s not something I would for real given a choice. That goes especially for free climbing that pits the climber against the terrain with just a bit of chalk on the hands between them. That’s exactly the type of climbing you will undertake in The Climb. The goal is to reach the end point of a fairly long route, with checkpoints scattered out along the way. Hint: the end point is far above the starting point. Getting there takes a lot of vertical movement, but also a lot of horizontal climbing as you negotiate towering heights and sketchy holds.
The Climb begins innocently enough with a narrated tutorial that takes about five minutes to complete and teaches you the basics. An optional Advanced tutorial that’s about as long is available from the menu after that. There are not a lot of controls or mechanics to learn, but every mechanic is critical and used constantly throughout the game. At some point there will probably be a patch for The Climb to support the Oculus Touch controllers whenever those get released, but for now, all controls are done through the gamepad and the movement of your (mostly upper) body, and more specifically your head, neck, and torso as you lean around rock faces for a better view and lean in to get eyes on your next hold. That said, this game is played while standing up.
Inside the Rift, you will see a pair of hands, with the skin tone of your choosing, gloves, wristband, and watch. The accessories can be changed out for different ones (cosmetic differences only) as you unlock in-game achievements. Anyway, the hands are all that you see of your virtual person and they move where you head does. To grab a hold, you have to physically look at the hold point and then use either the left or right trigger, depending on what hand you want to make the grab, and press and hold the trigger. There is a sub-mechanic here in that you do not need to press the trigger down all the way, but it’s challenging not to, especially when you feel like you’re going to fall very, very far if you botch the grip. If you get comfortable with half-pulling on the trigger, your stamina drains slower but getting comfortable with that might take longer than it sounds.
Stamina and grip are obviously vital. There is no health meter here — just a blue meter on each wrist that fills red as the hand is losing its grip. Stamina is lost in several ways, from having your hands spread out too far, holding on by one hand, touching a poisonous plant, to jumping from one hold to another. You can quickly regain stamina by holding on with both hands. In this position, you can literally hang tight as long as you want to, but for the sake of your level score and the fatigue of your real fingers, you don’t want to be idle very long. Stamina loss can be slowed down through the use of chalking your hands, done (one at a time of course) by pressing the bumpers on the gamepad. When you do this, there is about a three second animation of the hand getting dusted with fresh chalk. You can keep track of your chalk level by looking your hands and the wrist band will also display a message reminding you to re-chalk when it’s time. While you can play without chalking and stamina in Tourist Mode, you will not earn points for doing so. Conversely, during normal play, extra points are given for not running out of stamina. Also, there is no limit on how many times you can chalk. Furthermore, each climb starts with your hands pre-chalked which is a nice and simple convenience. Finally, without chalk, stamina drains very quickly, a red flash appears on screen, your character starts to grunt, and a bead or two of sweat runs down from the top of the view. Without correcting it immediately, grip is lost and you fall, having to revert to the previous save point.
Falling in The Climb is not as, well, scary as I was kind of thinking or hoping it would be. The sense of presence overall is mixed. That you only see your virtual hands, with no arms attached, I think contributes largely to my being able to disassociate with the virtual world. Additionally, when you do fall, the screen fades to white within a couple of seconds, so an epically long fall is cut short, every time. I’m not saying I would want to have to sit through every fall every time, or see any gory aftereffects, but falling in The Climb doesn’t get quite the emotion out of me that I had hoped it would. On the flip side, The Climb does a great job of giving the player amazing views and heights to go through. Some levels had me shaking my head at the route — are you kidding me? I would think in how insanely crazy these climbs are. They’re really cool to do in VR, but I’d just as soon faint as do them in real life I think. Traversing horizontally across a rock bridge, with your body literally dangling above a tremendous height with only water way down below gave me a slight sense of uncertainty in my knees. It was pretty powerful, despite the less than awesome resolution of the graphics that the CV1 of the Rift is limited by.
Even though The Climb falls (har har) somewhat short for me when it comes to giving me that sense of intimidation and fear of falling, it’s still a lot of fun and actually pretty addictive. Oh — and this is a good as time as any to mention this, I get no motion sickness from playing The Climb, which is awesome and a little surprising, in a good way. Anyway, there’s not a ton of content here per se, with three areas (Bay, Canyon, and Alps) available, each with three climbs (Easy, Medium, Hard). But what is here is enjoyable, and each climb can take a pretty long time, depending on how good you are. For most climbs, it took me between 20-30 minutes my first time through, and there are multiple paths in most as well (even if their fairly short), and some collectible things to find if you look closely. Plus, the routes are unique enough that they feel fresh again pretty quickly. Furthermore, integrated leaderboards appear when you look to your right on the level select screen and you can choose to Race against a ghost of the leaders. This is handy for learning some tips and really pushing yourself. It promotes replay, which you will have to do anyway to unlock enough stars to get to the Medium and Hard levels. You can get up to three stars per climb. Dozens of in-game achievements are available from the Progress area of the menu. Goals like Wingman (traverse 1,000 meters while jumping), Chalking 100 times (easy), doing 3500 normal grips, and many, many more await if you’re interested.
As far as presentation, The Climb looks really nice up close, which is your typical viewpoint, but the sense of presence takes a hit when you look around at the environment at a distance. The artwork and draw distance are great, but the clarity and resolution, as well as the SDE (screen-door effect) that is just a matter of fact for VR at this early stage, does taint the illusion (to what degree is up to the player). Similarly, those rare messages that black out the screen and say that my head has intersected an object and that I needed to move it aren’t fun, but they’re hardly deal-breaking. In those cases, I just had to crouch or bend over some to make room in the Rift for my head to fit under a protruding rock, for example. The sound package is good, it’s a quiet game for the most part, which is fitting. A brief strum of music usually greets you as you reach a checkpoint, and the effects add a lot to the atmosphere.
With that, let’s head to the summary…
