Difficulty done differently: Cairn and Baby Steps deliver kinder, more generous masocore

For the past week, instead of actually relaxing in the evenings, I have been ascending the gnarled brute of a mountain in Cairn. The onerous journey has left the toes of its alpinist star Aava bloodied; I’ve pushed the tendons of her rangy fingers to snapping point. With more frequency than I care to admit, I’ve caused this hell-bent climber to tumble down the same part of rock face over and over again, saved only by a piton. At other times, lacking such safety measures, she has bounced all the way down to Kami’s base off jagged, life-ending shards of rock. I curse the game, mountain, and myself with each major and minor tumble, every lost metre and handful of minutes.

But after much suffering, I made it. All in, my ascent of Kami took some 11 hours. That’s a little less than what it took me to reach the top of the misty mountain in Baby Steps. Despite their tonal differences (Cairn is solemnly earnest; Baby Steps is gonzo absurd), these games are cut from similar cloth. Both complicate locomotive mechanics (climbing and walking, respectively) that have been streamlined to a frictionless mush by triple-A blockbusters over the past 20 years. Both give you a straightforward goal that would make Todd Howard smile: see that mountain, climb it! Each of these games is, I think, a bold and brilliant addition to a cohort of titles we might collect under the “masocore” banner. But Cairn and Baby Steps go a little easier on the player than the likes of Super Meat Boy. That’s one of their quietly revelatory qualities: how they broaden video game difficulty.

If you’ll permit me a brief history of “masocore”, the term was popularised in the late 2000s by game designer, academic, and writer Anna Anthropy who herself attributed the word to a SelectButton.com forum member. The descriptor grew in popularity throughout the 2010s, enjoying an early spike in use around 2011, the year of – oh yes, that’s right – Dark Souls. Masocore isn’t quite a major part of player or critical parlance these days – though notably Nioh 3, just released, is one of a rare series to explicity describe itself as such – yet the ideas summoned by the TikTok-primed portmanteau (of “masochism” and “hardcore”) have defined 15 years of video games. Ego-skewering difficulty is venerated; players need to cultivate saintly patience if they wish to see the sights these uniformly challenging games offer; naturally, one must “git gud.”

But in Cairn and Baby Steps, you need not memorise the five attack patterns of a fiendish boss to move forwards; there are fewer demands that your thumb and fingers flutter dexterously across the controller or keyboard like a ballerina’s feet across the theatre stage. Indeed, Cairn’s control scheme is gloriously simple: the left analogue controls whatever limb the game deems suitable to move next; a single button locks that limb into place on the rock. The challenges these games offer – which are certainly not trivial – are thus approached in a more cerebral manner. You assess a stretch of turf or rock – its various, complicated gradients and changes in material composition (mud, rock, ice, etc) – and mentally plot the best route up to it.

What a thrill (and reprieve), it is to play genuinely difficult games where there are no arbitrary gates to progress. That’s part of the elegance of Cairn and Baby Steps; you are locked into battle, though it is with terrafirma rather than a rogues’ gallery of ultra-hard enemies. As such, the challenging encounters in these climbing games have a more naturalistic ebb and flow; if you struggle with one route, simply try another. These worlds are designed in such a way that if you fall – say, sliding down a 50-metre mud slide in Baby Steps – your character will land in a spot that causes you to see the terrain anew (and, likely, askew). Failure in combat-oriented games is not often accompanied with such literal, perspective-shifting revelations.

The vertiginous trials of Cairn – every fissure, crag, tor, escarpment, and ridge – have been meticulously designed and laid out by a talented team of level designers and artists. When I spoke to creative director Emeric Thoa, he was evidently proud of that fact. “I know we are in the year 2024, and there are words such as ‘procedural’ and ‘AI’, but we are designing and making this mountain entirely by hand, placing every single rock, crack and handhold,” he said. “It’s really a lot of work – very repetitive – and I’m so grateful to our level design team.”

Cairn was in development for six years. One imagines the production must have felt intensely durational for Thoa and his colleagues. There is perhaps also a mirroring in the game’s making with that of its playing: Cairn only lasts 11 or so hours (particularly if you make a beeline for Kami’s summit), yet the experience is one of arduous, incremental progress; you are locked into the single, monotonous task of ascending Kami for almost the entirety of this time, breaking only for cutscenes and when you cosy up in Aava’s bivouac to make food and rest.

Cairn’s embrace of slowness is at odds with the lightspeed rhythms of other video games, many movies, practically all of social media, and even much of offline life itself. Actually acclimating to Cairn’s slowness is part of the challenge: it demands sustained concentration in an era when attention spans are allegedly diminishing. Certainly, its idiosyncratic approach to pacing makes any lost progress all the more frustrating because of the time needed to reclaim it. The focus Cairn and Baby Steps both require makes me think of “slow cinema” movies like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s meditative mystery Memoria and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s aching drama Drive My Car. Like those directors, who each deliver magical payoffs which only work because of their films’ uncompromisingly unhurried tempos, the makers of Cairn and Baby Steps wield anticipation with similar skill. They make you put in the work, huffing and puffing up every vertical impediment, before delivering a full-body flood of emotion: pure, euphoric joy.

But hardship is the more common condition in these games, just as it is in Dark Souls, Silksong, and even Death Stranding. Often, this suffering feels distinctly Catholic in nature. Nate walks because he feels shame for his whole miserable being. In Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, Sam Porter Bridges walks the length and breadth of Australia, in part, as repentance for the responsibility he feels for the disappearance of his adopted daughter. The punishing difficulty of Pharloom in Silksong, whose currency is rosary beads, reflects an entire realm in penance.

If the motives behind these characters’ masochism is often clear, that of players is naturally more subjective. Why submit yourself to frustration, anguish, and perhaps even pain (in your mind and thumbs, if not your whole body) of a task which you are doomed to repeat ad nauseam? Cairn refracts this question through Aava. But one of the game’s smartest decisions is in refraining from showing her articulate exactly why she climbs so obsessively. In one tragic scene towards the game’s end, we see her try and fail to explain this compulsion to her partner over a radio device. But she is unable to verbalise these feelings. Frustrated at her own lack of words, Aava instead unleashes a single, guttural “fuck.”

The idea of obsession sits at the rugged core of Cairn. You puzzle over the supersized Kami as you might a Rubik’s Cube, examining it from different angles and experimenting until a route finally clicks into place. But all you need do is carefully move the left analogue stick and press one button. Here, then, is a more streamlined game of obsession, a more minimalist take on masochism, yet one which goes big where it matters. Its generous design should mean more people enjoy the rarefied sights Kami offers, and the rarefied emotions it inspires, too.