As a huge fan of games that bring new or fresh ideas to the table, Surmount has sounded promising from the first I heard of it. Looking to become the first person to tackle and then conquer the treacherous Mount Om, you’ll need to survive through multiple stages in each of its increasingly-difficult 4 biomes to pull it off. To be successful you’ll need to develop some technique, learn how to best utilize key equipment, and hopefully find some gear as well to give you the edge you’ll need.

With it essentially being a rock-climbing roguelike adventure of sorts, you’ll need to first learn the ways of surviving some challenging climbs. Whether it’s how best to choose your route, trying to minimize your energy expended to maintain your stamina, or getting the hang of slinging yourself around a bit to get to handholds that would otherwise be out of reach, there’s absolutely a bit of a learning curve. Thankfully, at each stage you’ll have the opportunity to participate in a number of smaller missions, most of which are helpful for trying to more carefully walk you through some basics and test you more in baby steps than overwhelming you with everything at once. It can be aggravating, but I’ll admit there’s then quite a sense of accomplishment when you manage to complete a section and then an entire biome, fighting through every obstacle and setback along the way.

Unfortunately, for the moment, probably the game’s biggest challenge is that it’s a bit buggy. I’ve been reassured that the developers are aware of most of the issues I’ve encountered, and are trying to get in a patch, but I will absolutely warn you that until some problems are ironed out the challenge is higher than it should be, and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Aside from outright critical bugs like randomly teleporting into a solid wall every once in a while, there are also some quirks that feel like unforeseen complications from the procedurally-generated nature of the climbs you’ll be facing. When tackling Mount Om the first thing you can expect is to encounter the unexpected. There often won’t be well-planned routes that are designed specifically to test your core skills, sometimes I’d find my options varied to the point of being a problem, especially when I could work a section only to find it was a dead end. Throw in some of the weird physics, the fact that you can incur injuries that can seriously jeopardize any hope for success, and an occasional goat or other unexpected threat that can royally screw you up at a critical time, and the game is happy to flex its roguelike unpredictability regularly.

With all of this in mind, I’m a bit torn on how to score the game, trying to find a balance between what I consider to be an interesting and challenging title, and the fact that it's hard to know what ultimate state it will end up in. In the past, at times, I’ve been inclined to trust that known issues will all get resolved properly, only to find later that the efforts had come up short and failed to address everything adequately. With this in mind, the score isn’t as high as I’d have given it if its state at launch were more polished. There’s no doubt that even now it is playable, there are just times when things don’t go as planned and you can lose a chunk of time through no fault of your own. Short of the bugs, the overall experience reminds me quite a bit of Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a tough game that I was still grabbed by. If you can be patient for the moment, and like a challenge, I’d say it is worth getting, but you may also want to pause for it to hit a sale and to get into a better overall state.