Of all the sports out there that have had games made for them, mountain climbing feels like a relatively new one, and yet somehow this is the second title I’ve checked out on Switch in that direction in just the past month or so. Thankfully, their takes on the sport are at least pretty wildly different, with Surmount going a roguelike and generally more single-player route, while Bread & Fred is a more straight-forward and co-op oriented experience whether you’re playing with a friend locally or not. Regardless, the main takeaway about it is that it is absolutely a serious challenge.

The key to success in the game, and typically the scourge of your existence as you play, is physics and the power of momentum. If you’re playing with a friend, this will be a matter of essentially alternating the task of managing these forces, and the angle at which they’re used in the hopes of going further up the mountain, rather than failing and inevitably falling further down it. In single-player you’ll instead simply work with a rock as your partner, swinging it around or throwing it into walls, to then try to sling yourself around. Weirdly, while you could assume that the game would be easier in co-op I’d beg to disagree, mainly because if you’re paired with someone who isn’t roughly at the same degree of skill, as you are needing to alternatively rely on one another may just spread the frustrations around, rather than you working to manage everything (including your building rage) yourself.

Now, there is a bit of good news to go with this crushing difficulty, and that’s the fact that there are a few options to help make the game less outright cruel. Chief among them is the ability to lay down a flag anywhere you’d like, essentially putting you in control of checkpoints, and with the amount of progress you can so quickly lose without using them I’d say they’re a must. Another that’s important will improve your grip duration, giving you a few more swings to feel that you’ve got the proper force and angle before you’ll lose your grip and also go plummeting down. Keep in mind though, while these options do help to make the game less evil in its determination to make you fail, I'd imagine most people will still find its demands to be far too cruel to be fun.

While the other title out there in this general vein, Surmount, launched with some unfortunate bugs and was also quite challenging, I also think that the difficulty level it dialed into was far more approachable. Rather than needing to dig into a menu to get some reasonable checkpoints established, these were baked in, allowing you to simply clip onto different pre-made spots to help break up the tricky sections you faced. I do enjoy the spirit of Bread & Fred, and the type of challenging cooperative play it is trying to bring to the table for those who are up to it. But I also can’t ignore that for most players out there this is dialed up too high to be readily approachable, making it tough not to knock it down in score a bit to reflect its likely quite niche target audience.