Yet Another Climbing Game

I have a weakness for games that make a single mechanic do all the heavy lifting, and Yet Another Climbing Game commits to that design philosophy harder than most. You get one control: grapple and swing. That's the entire toolkit. No jumps, no sprints, no safety nets. What you do get is a physics system that punishes every misfired momentum read with a long fall back toward the bottom, and a progress model that offers no checkpoints whatsoever. The game belongs firmly in the "rage platformer" subgenre pioneered by Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and carried forward by titles like A Difficult Game About Climbing - but where those games build elaborate obstacle courses, this one strips the concept down to something closer to a thought experiment about stubbornness. The grapple mechanic itself is the whole conversation. Each swing builds or bleeds momentum, and the physics feel deliberately slippery - the kind of slippery that reads as unfair on the first dozen attempts and then, slowly, as a system you can actually reason about. That shift is the core loop. You fail, you watch how gravity treated you, you adjust your angle, your timing, your release point. There's no tutorial and none is needed: the only lesson is the fall itself. Players who come from precision platformers expecting frame-perfect inputs will be frustrated, because the skill ceiling here is more about reading momentum arcs than hitting exact windows. Think pendulum physics, not button combos. The minimalist visual design is a choice that cuts both ways. On one hand, it keeps your attention locked on the climb rather than the scenery, which is probably the right call for a game this mechanically singular. On the other hand, there is not much here to soften the sting of repeated progress loss. The community response on Steam sits at a 100 percent positive rating across a small sample of reviews, which suggests it is landing well with its intended audience - players who self-select into this kind of punishment. Post-launch, the developer pushed updates tightening the UI, improving performance, and shrinking the install footprint, which signals active care for the release even at this modest scale. Who is this actually for? Not casual players, and not people who expect mechanical complexity to unfold over time. The audience is anyone who has finished Getting Over It and wants a shorter, cheaper version of that specific emotional exercise, or streamers looking for clip-worthy rage moments. The mysterious payoff at the summit is a real carrot, and the game earns some genuine intrigue by refusing to tell you what it is. As someone who usually wants seventeen systems talking to each other, I respect the honesty of a game that knows exactly how small its scope is and commits without apology. Just go in with eyes open: the depth is all in the repetition, not in any expanding ruleset.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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