Jusant

Jusant is a great overall experience which is essentially a climbing-based puzzle game tied in with a good amount of lore and story. The sound design and music in the game is fantastic as well. It's worth your time especially since it's a short experience, and I would say that the overall quality of the game makes it worth a non-sale price (although I did buy it on a sale). That said, I think it would be useful if I pointed out the main flaws of this game, but they're nitpicks. The climbing mechanics are only expanded on in a limited fashion, so a lot of the game is spent without doing a whole lot of new things. Some aspects of the climbing I don't find particularly fun, although most of them are. Knowing the game was short and wanting to see the end of the story did keep me hooked. For a story-heavy game, I thought that it's too easy to miss a lot of the details because of how easy it is to miss letters and murals. The end game lets you go back to the chapters and shows you what you're missing but that feels like false replayability to me. This game is inherently not very replayable especially if you're not the type of person who likes to watch movies over and over again, so I doubt I would ever go back to play any chapters just to find letters that I missed and piece together more of the lore. Still, I'm not sure making things too obvious/easy to find is the right move, either. I found some of the chapter breaks to be a little jarring. It would have been nice for the game to give you more of an illusion of climbing one continuous level. [spoiler]I know they were going for something of a post-apocalyptic vibe, but I think the game would have been richer if you actually encountered some remaining characters along the journey. I get it, it's a small studio with a limited budget, but sometimes when games stuff everything into text-based interactions and presents a deserted environment, it feels a bit convenient to make game development easier. Instead of making things like murals and letters as optional completionist challenges, maybe a few NPCs could have been the last ones in the tower giving out simple fetch quest-y optional side-quests or presenting their stories in person rather than relying on letters.[/spoiler]