Gideon’s Perspective
Friendslop games are akin to what we in the board game community might call “party games”. They are a type of game that is relatively cheap, and extremely simple to play. The act of playing a party board game is far less about the game itself, as the game in question only really serves to facilitate an excuse for a group of friends to hang out. The thing is, I don’t play party games. If a group doesn’t want to play a more interesting board game, I’d simply rather do another activity with them altogether.
Friendslop games are similar, except for the fact that I have been playing and enjoying them. But they fill the same niche. They are cheap enough that you don’t care if you only play them a handful of times and they largely serve to facilitate goofing off and laughing with friends. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but I’ve always had the nagging feeling that we would be better off playing a game that has actual substance that fills the same niche, something like Overcooked, or Mario Party. But I had tried to put that aside and enjoy friendslop games for what they were, and for a time, I did.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
That all ended when I played Peak. Peak serves as an example that a friendslop game can be an actual video game with mechanics outside of merely being a vehicle for funny moments, while still retaining that same humor and simplicity. To cut to the chase, while it’s absolutely hilarious to watch your friend tumble from the side of a mountain or knock them down with a snowball. Peak is also a good game, a damn good game with a thoughtful gameplay loop.
Succeeding in Peak by climbing to the top of the mountain, is a challenging experience that rewards planning, and teamwork. Once you get the trolling out of your systems, there is a very real obstacle for you to work together and overcome, and one that changes each day. For that reason, I no longer have any interest in friendslop games that don’t put real effort into being a mechanically sound video game on top of being an outlet for amusing shenanigans, Peak proves that a good friendslop game doesn’t have to sacrifice meaningful gameplay for a good social experience.
Friendslop Has Peaked
The goal of Peak is to climb to the top of a mountain through 5 distinct biomes. The biomes and layout of the mountain change every 24 real life hours, so even if you manage it once, you have a fresh challenge to tackle the next day. The core is pretty straight forward, you just jump and climb, simple right? Not quite. You have a stamina bar that drains while you climb. If you run out, you fall. Everything in the game affects this stamina bar. Injuries, poison, heat, cold, hunger and even the weight you carry takes up portions of your stamina bar giving you less climbing power, and managing it is foundational to succeeding in Peak.
You’re technically under two time constraints in Peak, the rising fog that will freeze you, and your hunger. The latter tends to be more dangerous. The longer you take, the hungrier you become, forcing you to seek out food amid the mountain, and not all biomes are generous with it. You have to strike a balance between finding and taking the safest most accessible paths and moving quick enough to outpace the fog and your own rumbling belly.
This is where luggage comes in. You can find luggage scattered around the mountain that contains random items, anything from food, rope, chain launchers, gliders, and more. You can carry up to three items, or seven if you have a backpack. Strategic use of these items is essential. Well placed chains can get you across otherwise impossible gaps, an energy drink can speed you up steep walls while a well time fortified milk can protect you from damage.
At the same time, hoarding items can be detrimental, as the weight of each item lowers your maximum stamina. You have to be smart about when to use these items and when it’s worth taking the weight penalty to carry them onward.
The items range from the grounded to the fantastical. While you have ropes and pitons, you also have cannons to fire yourself out of, anti-gravity bazookas, a Necromantic book and magic amulets to aid you. many of which have trades offs to using. All of them make climbing the mountain a more strategic experience.
If you play with friends, you have another utility in the form of teamwork, balanced by the fact that you now have more people to keep healthy and fed. If your friends are alive, leaving them behind isn’t an option, punishment awaits those who abandon their friends, and you can’t continue to the next biome without them anyway. If they die, you can revive them at a checkpoint, but you lose out on a random powerful item by doing so, and they take a hit to their maximum stamina.
Teamwork comes in many forms. At the baseline, you have more people to carry items, and you can also reach out your hand to grab and pull up your friends when they are climbing. You can stand on a friend’s head and allow them to launch you upward for some extra height on a jump. Basic items can be used for teamplay as well.
One person with higher stamina might be able to scale a tall wall with an energy drink, then lower a rope for their companions. One player can use a rescue claw, to snatch and pull friends to them. Some items are team focused entirely, a bugle of friendship grants temporary infinite stamina to friends while you play it, and even items that seem like they are meant to troll have useful benefits.
I don’t want to spoil how these items are used, but one example is an item can be used to kill you, but it grants the rest of the team max stamina and bonus stamina. I took a bad fall and had no hope of recovering, my friends weren’t much better off but were a lot higher than me after my fall. If we all died, we would lose and have to start over. I used the item to sacrifice myself to recharge them so they could get to the next checkpoint.
In other cases, you can rescue a friend who is dying if you can get to them before their timer runs out by giving them whatever they need, healing, food, whatever. If that’s not possible you can put them on your back and carry them until you find what they need.
Climbing the mountain in Peak is a thoughtful experience, not a mindless one. It’s a challenge that takes real effort to overcome by engaging with clever game mechanics. The core loop is interesting enough that I even enjoy playing solo. It’s simply fun to navigate the dangers of the mountain, seek out viable paths and use the tools you find to help you ascend.
It helps that unlike many friendslop games, Peak doesn’t feel janky. There are some instances where your feet can feel a bit wobbly when standing on thin or narrow spaces. But there isn’t goofy physics meant to trip you up. Controlling your climber feels deliberate and smooth. You can really get into the zone sometimes where you’re parkouring around with a ton of grace and I love that feeling.
The biomes themselves are also interesting. You will always start at some variation of the shore where danger is mostly limited to just falling. You might touch a poison urchin or slip on a jellyfish but it’s straight forward. Every other biome has an array of quirks.
The Roots are full of bouncy shrooms, a variety of mushrooms, high winds and even some hostile creatures. The Tropics are filled with twisting spiked vines, pouring rain and explosive bombshrooms. The bitter cold of the Alpine has you contending with ice, freezing winds and geysers, while on the opposite side of the spectrum, the Mesa has you using shade to hide from the burning sun while avoiding tornados, tumbleweeds and dynamite.
The lava filled Caldera and Kiln spell death if you fall in the lava, while the maze-like gloom can freeze you in a fog filled with grabby frogs and angry ghosts. Get through the gloom and you have a twisting trap filled tower to contend with.
Not every biome is present at once and even the same biomes get a new layout each day. They rotate between 208 different map variations which is a crazy amount of replay value. To further add to the games replayability are ascending modifiers called ascents. You have to complete a climb with an ascent level active to unlock the next one and the modifiers stack. Increased hunger, fall damage, weight and more all further the challenge of the climbing mountain. Considering that with most friendslop games, the novelty wears thin after a session or two. Peaks replay value is a massive point in its favor.
At the same time, Peak infuses its excellent gameplay with that amusing friendslop humor, but in a more organic fashion. Trolling your friends is funny once or twice, but the challenge of the mountain makes it less appealing. The real humor comes from organic interactions within the game mechanics. The proximity chat is very well done so when a friend slips and falls down the mountain, you can hear their screams fade into the abyss.
Watching a friend get picked up by a tornado and then slammed into a cactus will have you cackling with joy while you run to save them. Hearing dynamite explode followed by a stream of echoing profanity from your friend is hilarious. At one point, I heard my partner start screaming, “help, help, help!” I ran and she was being sucked in by a whirlpool of sand with a nasty creature waiting at the center. I pulled her out but by doing so fell in myself and started screaming “help help help!” as we had simply switched places and now, I was the one in peril. It made everyone laugh.
Your characters mouth moves when you speak, and you can customize their faces which also lends to the humor. My friend had a character with narrowed suspicious eyes and a shit eating grin who, wordlessly turned to look at me, then at a gap, then back to me, then ran, jumped missed the landing and fell and I couldn’t even help him because I was too busy laughing. His characters face made the interaction unreasonably funny, like “hold my beer” before immediately doing the dumbest thing possible.
A lot of friendslop games try too hard to be funny. Peak is just organically funny within the mechanical design of the game, and importantly, it’s simply a good game beyond the humor.
Verdict
I think this is a long-winded way of me saying that I don’t view a lot of friendslop games as games. I view them as a virtual sandbox of goofiness to make you and your friends laugh. That’s fine for people who enjoy them. But after Peak, I’d rather stick to games that can stand on their own beyond being a virtual space to goof off. Not only do I get to enjoy a good video game, but the humor feels stronger because it doesn’t feel forced. Other friendslop games are like, take these items, now do something funny. Peak is like take these items and climb a mountain, but It’s going to be really funny when your friend glides into an explosive shroom and tumbles down the mountain like a wheel of cheese.
For now, Peak is the Peak of my friendslop experience, and the one I’ll use to judge whether or not a friendslop game is worth my time going forward. It showed me that a friendslops signature social experience can be embedded into a goal oriented mechanically sound game. Peak is simply enjoyable to play and has the replay value that many friendslop games lack.
I’m giving it my Golden Shield award.
