Cairn's Beautiful Search for a Mountaineer's Purpose

Playing Cairn, the latest game from Furi and Haven developer The Game Bakers, is hours of trials, tribulations, revelations, successes, failures. It's telling the story of a world-class alpinist, Aava, trying to find herself on One Last Climb, but it's also letting you embody her and experience the climb itself. 

Through meticulous re-creation of the process of mountain climbing, it gives you the tools to try and answer the question of why someone like Aava is attempting something so dangerous and potentially futile. It's a deeply fierce gaming challenge to ascend, carefully placing one limb at a time on hand and footholds, to the very top of an inaccessible mountaintop. Cairn is an experience that leaves one breathless, moved, and, in all honesty, changed.

It’s one of the most remarkable video games of the past 10 years, let alone 2026.

“We want to leave players with everlasting memories,” said The Game Bakers co-founder and CEO Audrey Leprince. “We want our games to mark them and to bring them an experience.”

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Cairn tells its story in two distinct modes. 

There’s Aava’s emotional journey, which largely plays out in cutscenes, as Aava reaches different milestones alongside her quest to scale Mount Kami, a kaiju-sized beast of a mountain that is, for most, a doomed endeavor. There is a reason the natural inhabitants of Kami have finally abandoned it, why the cable cars no longer run. But Aava is drawn to Kami and what might exist at the top. Plus, the world wants to watch her try. They want the happy photo at the top of a mountain. But will reaching the summit provide an explanation for why she climbs, despite how much anxiety it causes the rest of the people in her life? An understanding of why she chooses isolation over community? It’s a question the game asks, even if Aava tries to avoid an answer.

“It was really the fascination of all of those people who put their lives in danger for a sport or a hobby,” said Leprince. “And alpinism was really embodying that idea of 'Why do you do that?' Why do you make yourself so miserable in some ways? It's so dangerous and it's so hard and it's so painful and you might die out there and yet you want to go again.”

It’s a story that’s personal to Leprince, too; her father was an alpinist. He’s even listed in the credits, because he was an active advisor during development. He was also part of climbs that caused Leprince stress as a child. In one instance, half the people in her father’s group didn’t make it back. On some level, Cairn is a chance for Leprince to explore a family question: 

Why?

“I am lucky that I share the question with everyone and I think people will make their own answer to it,” she said. “There’s no answer in Cairn. We don't want to give answers. We more want to ask the question and then let you decide what you think is the answer. But [I’m] definitely closer.”

Then, there’s the player’s own arc. In Cairn, you have full control over Aava’s arms and legs. The majority of your time in Cairn is spent slowly placing one of those arms and one of those legs in increasingly precarious parts of Kami, as you slowly (hopefully) climb up. It feels like solving a puzzle every time you move a single part of her, and any mistake could be her last. Aava is a world-class athlete, but Kami is a world-class opponent, and the additional tools Aava has access to—pitons and a rope, mostly—are distressingly limited.

Leprince described the development of Cairn as three-year journey with a three-fold challenge:

1. How players control the character
2. The physics and climbing system
3. The level design of the mountain itself

All three challenges had unique issues of their own to overcome, but the mountain itself was the one that required the most work on The Game Bakers’ part. There was no path to follow. 

“No one's ever done it before,” said Leprince. “People just put holes and pre-calculated animations that are going to trigger and everything. We arrived and there was nothing. We had to invent all our workflow, all our pipeline, all our tools, all our process to reach that level of level design. And it took us some time, I can tell you. We spent at least a year just in pre-production, just trying to figure out is this going to work.”