The sun rises over Mesa, the brand new biome that launched with the latest update to Aggro Crab’s climbing game Peak. As the light pours out onto the sand and spills across the cactus laden landscape, my friend Erica and I stand over a rocky cliff edge observing the chaos below; a wild and aimless tornado, a chittering sand worm, tumbleweeds with the physical force of a bowling ball. I turn and look back at the cliff face behind us, uncertain if the slant in the otherwise sheer rock is enough to stand on as we seek a path to the summit.
“What’s your bonus stam looking like?” Erica asks as she starts moving towards the rock face.
I look over at my stamina bar. About 15 percent reduced by hunger and the weight of the backpack I’m wearing with some food and supplies. My bonus stamina bar, temporary stamina acquired via consuming certain foods or drinks, is completely full.
“I’m stocked,” I tell her. “Should we try it?”
We both pause and listen for the rest of our team. I hear echoes that sound like they’re coming from above us and to our right, but that manner of tracking our friends has been historically unreliable. I look back at what I have in my backpack, wondering if an energy drink or a lollipop will be enough to boost me past that questionable shelf. If it isn’t standable, we risk falling a pretty substantial drop and likely losing the run.
While the cogs in my brain are turning, Erica charges past me, leaps over the opposite cliff edge and towards the sheer rock face. Before I can say anything, she’s clinging to it like the little resourceful superstar that she is, carefully inching her way towards the slanted outcrop. I hold my breath and wait, until the animation of her character heaving itself up to stand on the outcrop proves our theory. I sigh with relief.
“This’ll work!” she says, as she pauses for just a moment to recover her stamina, and continue the climb. “This is doable!”
I am quiet for a moment, and smile a bit as I watch her continue the upward climb and reach the top of the cliff face. She turns to face me, hand already outstretched, to pull me up as soon as I’m in range.
“Yeah,” I reply, as I get a running start and leap for the cliff face. “This is doable.”
Following its release in mid June, Peak has climbed to the top of virtually every co-op group’s gaming list. With new maps every day, you never get the same climbing experience twice, making the game fun and forcing new strategies each day in your efforts to reach the game’s actual peak.
I’ve been playing co-op games with my friends for years. I grew up in the era of Halo, when the prime experience of co-op gaming was competing against your friends for glory in the metaphorical gaming arena. But the reality is, I’ve never much liked being “competitive” with my friends. I want to work with them, not against them. And while there are many options for that (I also played Destiny with my friends for many years), it still always fell into the bucket of being a shooter and shooting lots of things to achieve your goals.
In the last couple of years, we have been blessed with such gems as Lethal Company and Repo, little low budget gems which have exploded on the scene and provided a chaotic and hilarious avenue for friends to salvage equipment, earn rewards, and work together to overcome obstacles (read: monsters and demon babies) to achieve greatness. That said, the objective is such a small, often unimportant detail of the experience. It’s always just been about spending time with friends, encountering ridiculous situations, and finding joy in the way we react to those situations.
That formula is what makes Peak so wonderful. You’re not after an in-game financial reward. You’re not hunting scraps for a thankless boss. You are, quite simply, climbing a mountain with your friends. Mountains that increase in difficulty with each successful summit, but difficulty that leads to fun, often ridiculous outcomes. More than anything, it allows me to do the thing I care the most about: spend time with my friends.
If we want a challenge, we can do one of the harder modes and use our collective brain power to achieve a common goal. If someone had a bad day, we can play on easy mode (called Tenderfoot in game), and just enjoy a peaceful climb and chat to decompress. If someone is celebrating a birthday, we can get the whole squad together, throw in a few mods, and charge forth like an invading army to capture victory at the highest summit. There really is something for everyone, whatever kind of mood you’re in on a given day.
Erica and I have now found ourselves facing another outcrop that is covered in wall cacti. It’s going to be a maze to climb around them to hit the next standable shelf. Hitting any of them will cause the wall cactus to attach to us, limiting our stamina and stacking if we hit more. Erica, as always, takes the initiative and starts the ascent. She has the grace that I lack; as I crawl onwards, I take a couple of cacti and my stamina is immediately cut nearly in half.
“Erica! I’m slipping!”
I barely finish my sentence when I see lime green arms reach out and pull me upward right at the last second before I slip into the abyss.
“Not today!” she says with gusto.
I take a deep exhale and bite my lip rather dejectedly after my clumsy attempt to scramble up the incline. For Erica’s grace, I make up for it with the finesse and grace of a newborn giraffe. She plucks the cacti off me and chucks them off the cliff, and I watch them sail down past the fogline and into oblivion. Looking back towards the summit, the voices of our friends are becoming clearer. Neither of us needs to say a word as we kick ourselves back into gear with one final push.
Peak’s formula is one that sounds cliche, but accurate in every respect: it really isn’t so much about the journey as it is about the friends made along the way. Or, I suppose in this case, the friendships, cultivated, treasured, and held in gratitude. And as we crest that final hill, we see our friends standing around a campfire with marshmallows, dancing and cheering as they watch us run towards them.
“Took you long enough!” shouts Toon as he dances.
We all stand around the campfire, marshmallows in hand, cooking them and eating them to recover stamina. The fog blocking the final biome evaporates, and we stare down into Caldera, with its lava rock towers and walls of fire pulsing in the distance. Before anyone else can blink, I pop my parasol out of my inventory and charge towards the outcrop leading into the hell fires below. As I take a glorious leap, my rainbow parasol begins to float me whimsically down into hell as I hum the theme song from Disney’s Up. I can hear the laughter in the background begin to fade into indecipherable echoes. But Erica’s unmistakable laugh continues to ring out into the ether as I Mary Poppins my way into Caldera, stand on the tallest lava rock tower, and wait for her, with hand outstretched.
