Climbing is one of the great joys of video games. It's one of the things I am always looking out for.
It felt like it was a rarity in games until something like Crackdown came along. I was a long way through Crackdown before I realised that it wasn't really about shooting people or driving cars - its purest pleasures involved navigating the game's complex interlocking 3D world. For years I described it as a platform game, until I had a chat with John from Digital Foundry, who argued that if it was a platforming game, it wasn't a brilliant one. He was right, of course. Crackdown's not a platforming game so much as a climbing game.
Now climbing games are much more common. Grow Home was a great climbing game. This year I've played demos for Jusant and Surmount, both of which handle climbing in their own ways. And this week I played Assassin's Creed Mirage, which is an Assassin's game, an open-worlder, a historical game - its Baghdad is a wonder - and also a great example of how weird triple-A games often are these days. But also, what I'm left with more than anything else, is the realisation that it's a climbing game. All Assassin's games are.