TL;DR bad performance, mediocre music, wonky gameplay pacing, and a botched ending ruined a game I really wanted to like.

Man, I really wish I could recommend this game. It being billed as a chill game with cool climbing mechanics and compared to Journey sounds like a match made in heaven for me. The problem is, I don't think the game delivers on these fronts and the whole thing smacks of executive meddling and budget constraints to me.

I'll say, what the game does well is largely what you've been hearing: it has pretty visuals, neat climbing mechanics, and a very interesting world that it spends a lot of time building in lore and revealing to the player visually. When you scale a good climbing route, summit to a fascinating new vista, and then read letters from that place's inhabitants that add to the mystery, the game really hits.

The problem is, well, everything surrounding those moments.

To start, it is both unoptimized and unfinished in many ways. I'm talking needing DLSS and medium settings to even hit 60fps on a 2080 unoptimized. All while having minimalist geometry, very few particles/physics entities and very, very blocky and low-res textures. I'm all for a minimalist art style, and I'm all for using ray-tracing and other high-end tech, but come on. Cyberpunk runs better on my machine with ray tracing than this does, and that lets you turn it off if you want (Jusant doesn't). This game is also a terrible fit for real time light simulation, as a central pillar of the lore is that the sun never moves, and the few areas where there is no sun come loaded as separate levels after cutscenes. No light sources even move in the whole game apart for a couple rare cases. Baked lighting would have worked great here. Add to that some really aggressive shadow LODs (even on high settings), fringing/ghosting around objects, motion trails due to bad TAA, animations for creatures that get lowered to like 30fps or less when they're farther away, and way too many collision problems for a game about exploring your environment, and it's a little bit of a mess technically.

One thing that I have a lot of praise for is the sound design, which was detailed and rich and even central to the world building through the echos of the past you listen to in the shells. Great stuff. The music however, did not grab me at all. Contrary to what a lot of other reviews here say, I would caution fans of Journey not to expect anywhere near that level of artistry. The themes were basic, chord progressions and melodies were predictable, and there was only one bit of ambient music that really did anything for me (chapter 4). There was even a section that sounded like it used a very stock and immersion-breaking synth tone. Austin Wintory, this is not. No cellists will make you shed tears here.

The climbing, while a really good idea, is never fleshed out enough or varied enough in its challenges. You basically learn 4 or 5 moves, use them the whole game, and very occasionally get a new one to use only in a few scripted segments. I really liked it for about 2 chapters, then it got more and more stale as I realized I was never going to really have to think, either because of harder challenges or interesting new mechanics to integrate. Which was a huge bummer, because the foundation is really solid. Someone should take these ideas and make a proper difficulty curve with them.

And then the world building. This was my favorite part of the game. This landscape, its history and the way the change from sea to rains to drought affected the economy and social order was really neat and seemed well thought out. I loved reading about people worrying for the future and mythologizing the past. BUT... that all falls apart at the end. The story concludes so abruptly and strangely that I can only think they either didn't have an ending planned from the start or ran out of time/money to flesh things out further. The technical issues, pacing of abilities, and the awkward way the levels escalate towards the end make me think it was the latter. It just suddenly brings you to the final "level" and then you achieve your goal and... that's it. No resolution, no witnessing the impact you had on the pretty world you just traveled through, no more story explanation, even of the biggest questions like who you are and why you're here now (things I was looking forward to all game). Just a flat image with credits rolling. That was the moment I knew I had to leave a negative review.

If you want a beautiful game with a compelling world, music, and story, go play Journey. If you want cool traversal mechanics and pretty rocks and plants, go play Death Stranding. If you want a game with great vibes to soak in and don't mind some shortcomings with platforming, go play Stray. This game just asks you to ignore too much to love it in my opinion.