Interview: Climbing the tower with Jusant’s art director

It’s been an incredible year for gaming with a bit of something for everyone. One of the unexpected gems of 2023 is Jusant, a game by DON’T NOD.

The game doesn’t ask you to do anything particularly complicated – there’s a tower, and you’re supposed to climb it. Proceed, and you’ll find yourself on a delightful and occasionally challenging journey that manages to tell an emotional tale.

What is Jusant?

It’s unlike anything else, though there are some games worth comparing it to if you’re trying to figure out what you’re getting yourself into. Much like Journey, Jusant offers a calm yet curiosity-piquing atmosphere, and while you’re not always certain where you’re going and why, the promise of solving mysteries motivates you to keep moving forward.

You’ll also find Jusant familiar if you’ve played Death Stranding, as your main rival is the landscape, and gameplay is almost entirely composed of traversal. Lastly, like Team Ico games, Jusant relies on environmental storytelling to tell its cryptic tale.

It’s a relatively short game that can be completed in an afternoon or two though it’s engaging enough to have you wishing for a sequel as soon as you’re done. To help you climb up the tower, you have rope, some pitons, and an adorable sidekick that’s able to affect your environment in useful ways. Climbing is a matter of finding the right pathways to progress, which occasionally requires a little out-of-the-box thinking.

It’s a gorgeous game with relaxing gameplay that’ll put a smile on your face. As you ascend, you’ll be treated to breathtaking views and beautiful environments that feature aesthetically pleasing use of light. Thanks to a recent accessibility update, more players than ever can access this title. The update brings several accessibility options including a simplified climbing mode and colorblindness settings.

Sitting down with Jusant’s art director

I recently got the chance to interview Jusant art director Edouard Caplain. We covered several topics, including the inspiration behind the game, how it has been received, as well as how it fits into DON’T NOD’s body of work.

Destructoid: Jusant has a very distinct art style, featuring simple, rounded shapes, bright colors, and smooth textures. What was the inspiration for this art style?

Caplain: It’s something I’ve always been keen to try. Working with almost flat colors, shapes, and lighting works very well in painting, but having this translated in 3D is another story. The art team behind INSIDE did it very well, it looked fantastic. Jusant has this distinctive climbing gameplay where the goal is to ‘read’ the walls and find where the grips are. So, relying on 3D shapes – like real climbers do – felt right.

And the colors, along with the music, aim to bring the positivity and oneirism that we wanted the player to feel throughout the game.

Destructoid: The game’s story unfolds through environmental storytelling, as well as notes left lying around. Were there any challenges working with this minimalist storytelling style?

Caplain: It was definitely a challenge, as devs coming from the Life is Strange series we are used to relying heavily on dialogues to convey our stories. But for Jusant we wanted to make a game less grounded in our reality, something almost dreamy – where everything didn’t need to be explained.

So we lost the dialogs, but we kept everything else that we did before: zen sequences in Life is Strange became the shells in Jusant where you listen to the sounds of the past for example, and the letters, cinematics, music, and of course the environment storytelling.

It’s a different approach as the player may not read any of the letters but it’s okay – it’s not mandatory. The game is made so you have a chill and meditative experience on a mysterious tower. It’s up to the player if they want to know more about the lore.

Destructoid: How did the idea for Jusant’s unique gameplay come about?

Caplain: The gameplay came first: the very first pitch for Jusant was about climbing a giant mysterious tower. Then after that came everything else.

The gameplay is a crucial part of Jusant, so finding the right balance between challenge and fluidity in the climbing, the use of the rope, the pitons, the interactions with the world, was important. Basically, all the gameplay bricks that are necessary to keep the player entertained on the big climb.

Destructoid: I found Jusant to be an incredibly meditative experience that managed to be engaging without causing frustration. What feelings were you trying to evoke with Jusant and why?

Caplain: Definitely this! One of our main inspirations was Journey, that we all really loved. Like Journey we tried to challenge the players enough to push them up the tower, and also give them the time to relax and feel the atmosphere. Something important was to let the player climb at their own pace.

Destructoid: The ending is weird yet hopeful, giving you and your water blob buddy a satisfying reward for your arduous climb. Did you intend for Jusant to be a hopeful game?

Caplain: We tried to, yes. The setting on paper could feel pessimistic: it’s a post-apocalyptic barren world that everybody left, and you’re climbing in the middle of the ruins of past civilizations.

But we tried to convey hope through nature. Nature has taken over this world again and the animals are roaming free. Your ballast companion interacts with this nature to help you climb up. The idea of connecting with nature to elevate yourself, and overcoming your challenges together, was important for us.

Destructoid: The game is quite different from the projects DON’T NOD has put out in the past. Was this an intentional choice, and did you draw from any past DON’T NOD titles during development?

Caplain: Jusant had to be a game with a narrative aspect, but DON’T NOD didn’t push us into doing another Life is Strange. And as a team we wanted to try something different, smaller, and gameplay oriented. But we did of course keep and use our experience in invoking emotion – through music, cinematics and environmental narrative – and designing singular environments to substantiate this smaller project.

Destructoid: Are there any ideas that never made it into the final cut?

Caplain: A couple of early ideas didn’t survive conception and preproduction, as they would raise too many questions or not fit into the narrative. For example, at one point, interactions with other humanoids were discussed. Another idea was to ride one of those big beetle-like creatures, but the idea was dropped in the end.

Destructoid: Jusant is an eccentric game, which comes with risks. Are you surprised by how well the game has been received?

Caplain: Yes, both surprised and very happy with the amount of interest the game has raised. We knew it was a singular project and thus complicated to market to the outside world. But DON’T NOD has been very supportive throughout its development and since launch – the amount of exposure we’ve had has been incredible. It lets us reach more players that we hope will see what we tried to achieve with Jusant.

Destructoid: Any plans for more stories within Jusant’s world?

Caplain: Nothing is planned yet but the lore we created is rich and there is definitely space for more games in this universe.

Jusant is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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