‘Why do they climb mountains? Why do they sacrifice everything and take so many risks just to climb a rock – nobody asked them to?’ — Cairn’s creative director unpacks the studio's survival-climber

If you look up popular quotes about life, a common theme crops up — ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’, or ‘practice makes perfect’, and so it goes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that, though it’s painful to admit, these cliches have hung around for a reason and are often true. But I’ve found few games that crystallize these ideas as meticulously as Cairn, the latest adventure from indie studio The Game Bakers, which has players embark on an epic climb up a massive, unforgiving mountain.

“After making (Furi and Haven), I wanted to dig even more into the absolute search for freedom,” explains Emeric Thoa, The Game Bakers’ Creative Director. “While thinking about that, I remembered this fascination I have for alpinism stories, and I thought that could be the way to talk about the search for absolute freedom ...