"When men and mountains meet, great things happen," said William Blake. And in his little one, Insurmountable It's a great thing. If nothing else for the originality with which the product ofByteRockers Games enters the crowded and recyclable panorama of rogue-like. In this small indie pearl we will not have dungeons to explore, enemies to kill or skill to level, in reality we will have only 4 "enemies", that is the 4 mountains that we will have to climb, surviving the weather and our deepest weaknesses. .
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Death scales at your side
In Insurmountable We can take control of one of three adventurers, each with a different background and skills, as well as a different motivation that leads him to scale the unsurmountable: we will the adventurer, always looking for a new challenge; The scientist, always at the border between genius and madness; and finally the journalist, in continuous search of the last sensational scoop.
Selected your alter ego will be time for another choice, or difficulty. At the first start will be available only the first level (normal), to take familiarity with the title, but do not think it is a walk, anything else. Finally, select the mountain and the way to reach the top, finally comes the time to walk.
Each mountain is generated procedurally to each run, and all are represented with hexagonal dowels, similar to the maps of Civilization to mean us, and each dowel represents a particular type of terrain. We will move by selecting the box we want to reach and our character will move automatically following the shortest route to the destination. Please note: not always the shortest way is the best! Dangerous lands, glaciers, crevices and steep vertical scales represent possiblely deadly dangers, so you will have to evaluate every move in the smallest detail if you want to survive. Along the way we will also find special boxes that will activate particulars events written: meetings with wild animals, old abandoned relics or simply traces of the passage of other climbers, we will decide whether to dwell in these meetings or proceed without wasting time.
In addition to deciding the best route, the player is required to monitor and manage various statistics of our alpinist, in order to allow its survival: first of all Health bar, which for obvious reasons must be kept as full as possible. Accidental fall of rocks, ice slides or other dangers can attack our living points, which must be preserved until the end of the climb in order to succeed in our goal. Then we will have the Stem bar, important indicator of the physical fatigue of our alter-ego. Spending too much time without sleeping or facing particularly rough routes so we are not prepared will drastically drop our energy, forcing us to take breaks to recover breath. Then we have the mental health bar, more subtle to manage: during the climb, in fact, our morale will be put to a hard test, for example by finding corpses of other climbers on our way, or simply when we are forced by the scarcity of resources to "to borrow" from the base camps of other climbers. The last two statistics to manage are the temperature and oxygen: the first obviously will be preserved avoiding sleeping at the additive or choosing to climb only during sunny days; the oxygen instead becomes necessary only after reaching a certain altitude, after which it will be necessary to manage very carefully our forces and, possibly, to resort to oxygen tanks, always if we have them available.
Commitments and probability
If, as is very likely in the first run, we will find ourselves dealing with our wrong calculations and then one (or more) of the 4 blank statistical bars, we will enter the so-called "critical status": continuing to climb without restoring such stats, the probability that adverse events fall upon us rises dizzyingly, and with them very often the game over comes. As in every roguelike that respects, however, also Insurmountable presents a levelling system of our character, resulting in unlocking important skills, active or passive, which significantly increase our survival skills, always if you use cum corn salis.
And as if all this is not enough, to put on the paw there is also the weather, with weather changes in real time able to completely overturn our floors, as climbing during a snowfall is absolutely not like climbing during a clear sky day. Not even to say, there is also a cycle night-day, with which we will have to deal with above all to avoid staying without shelter during night rest, fundamental to recover valuable energies.
Technically speaking
We tried.Insurmountableon the following configuration:
AMD Ryzen 7 3700x @ 3.60 GHz
Gigabyte GTX 1080 8Gb
Kingston Hyper x FURY (2x8Gb) DDR4
Resolution 3440x1440 (21:9)
The title behaves absolutely well, not reaching very high peaks as to frame-rate, but given the nature of the game, it does not feel all in all the need. Graphically enough, a little less the sound, with a nenia at first relaxing but that in the long run ends up tired. Bugs and sporadic crashes do not heavily alter the game experience, which remains all solid and satisfactory. Of course you could maybe do something more for the UD, a little bit 'slim' in our opinion, but we're talking about details.
In conclusion
Insurmountable is definitely an ambitious and innovative title, which intertwines in the roguelike landscape by proposing a theme never seen. This, by force of things, relegates him to be a title mostly niche, able to attract especially lovers of mountaineering and survival, and that he will be able to occupy such fans for a long time, given the intrinsic difficulty of the game. Pondering every choice, managing your own resources efficiently and, why not, taking advantage of the blessing of the blessed goddess, will be fundamental actions for the player who wants to bring home the skin in Insurmountable.
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