Insurmountable Review

Insurmountable is a roguelite turn-based survival mountain climbing strategy simulator, wow that was quite a long description of the game. There’s not a much of a story here but at the beginning you can choose from being an adventurer, a scientist or a journalist, you’re exploring and climbing a secret island that has some mysterious happenings, there’s some supernatural events you don’t ever really know what’s going on but there is kind of a subtle story in the background, there are three mountains but they are randomly generated so you can play it as much as you like.

When you’re going up those mountains you will randomly see icons that tell you there’s some equipment or there’s going to be an encounter, all of those might be good or bad but let’s just say that the results of those events end up being pretty predictable and repetitive after a few runs. There are five major things you need to care about, the sanity of your character, body temperature, energy, oxygen and health. Health is the most important because if you don’t have your health you don’t have anything, there are night and day cycles so in the night it’s more freezing, you need to sleep as well so it’s better to sleep during the night. You have to think carefully about your equipment like oxygen tanks to refresh your oxygen once you get past 6000 meters then your oxygen starts depleting, hot tea will increase your temperature but you have limited space in your backpack so you have to decide what you take as you’re going up the mountain and when you use the equipment, there’s a thing that you need to be careful about because it’s not only about climbing the mountain and reaching the summit but you need to get down as well so after you reach the top, you need to go to the exit point as well, you need to make sure that you have enough equipment to get you down the other side of the mountain, it’s quite difficult even to reach the summit.

This is a roguelite so you’re often leveling up and getting skills, if you master one of those skills it actually becomes an active skill that you can activate when you really need it, it will carry through to the next game if your character dies then in the next playthrough you will actually keep those skills and it should be a little bit easier to climb the mountain. Graphically it’s pretty good though definitely not the strong point of the game and the soundtrack is forgettable. If realism and graphical perfection is the immersion you’re looking for and is a huge deal for you, this may not be the type of game for you. The terrain is very well done in my opinion, however the actual hexagons that are used for movement are purposefully left that way to give you an easier time seeing the difference between playable tiles and the areas in which aren’t walkable and are just there for design purposes. I personally had no issue “immersing” myself into the game, however if you are expecting a AAA graphical experience then this might not be the game for you.

Overall, Insurmountable is fun and a new take on the roguelite genre, though if you’re not a fan of roguelites and dislike the repetitive nature of them then this should be a pass for you as it does get very repetitive after a while.

Check out Insurmountable on Steam!