A Look At The Overlooked And Strangely Cozy Insurmountable

I played Insurmountable and found it is not a game about finding the next handhold. Many games include climbing, some like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding even treat the act with mechanical seriousness, factoring in weather and stamina.

Other games are entirely about the climb itself, where a player considers each limb's movement, as in the social game PEAK or the virtual reality experience The Climb. Insurmountable, a 2021 release from ByteRockers’ Games, is a different kind of mountaineering game.

It is tactical, breaking down the exploration of wilderness into a turn-based strategy focused on planning routes and managing resources. It is also a choose-your-own-adventure where the mountain path is dotted with strange events and discoveries. The game’s core is captured by its sanity meter. This is one of five personal reserves I had to monitor as I plotted a course up and down mountains made of raised hexagonal tiles. The other stats were health, energy, body temperature, and oxygen.

The sanity meter does not signal a horror game, though there are surprising fantasy and sci-fi elements in the plot. It instead highlights the game’s emphasis on mental endurance alongside physical survival. The longer my climber spent alone on the mountain in difficult conditions, the more sanity drained away. Yet the mountain could also restore it through a chance meeting with another person or the discovery of a beautiful vista. This game is about the long, lonely experience of exploring the wilderness more than most others in the genre.

A single turn in the game consumes several hours of in-game time, and a full ascent can last for days or weeks. This makes planning when and where to sleep to recover energy a critical decision. Time itself functions as an abstract resource I had to manage, much like oxygen or body heat. I had a lot of it, but not an infinite supply, and every action carried a cost. This was most apparent during events triggered at points of interest on the map.

I had to weigh the time it would take to search an abandoned camp against the potential reward. Those searches could yield energy-restoring food, oxygen tanks, or equipment to keep my climber warm. The game uses a roguelite structure, which means it incorporates permadeath, randomized events, and procedurally generated mountains that are never the same on two separate playthroughs. I could unlock and develop multiple climber archetypes across different runs.

The game world features dynamic weather, and visibility is a constant concern. Storms and the darkness of night reduce the ability to see the path ahead, making route planning more challenging and reactive. Despite these pressures, I found the experience of playing to be the opposite of stressful. Like many single-player, turn-based titles, it is an ideal game to play in a relaxed setting. It is a ruminative experience that can be controlled with one hand on a mouse while holding a warm drink in the other.

It feels perfectly suited for a long winter evening, sitting in the warm and dry while sending a small figure, turn by turn, deeper into a biting and lonely digital wilderness. The journey up each mountain felt less like a technical puzzle and more like a strategic narrative of survival against the elements, where my own foresight was the most important tool for reaching the summit and making it back down again.

Insurmountable is available to play on PC (on Steam).