Peak is a game released in 2025 by indie studios Landfall and Aggro Crab. Earlier this week, I played it with some friends online via Steam. The game is targeted at pre-existing friend groups, thus it doesn’t exhibit many friendship building design patterns. For example, the main way to make lobbies is via steam friends and much of the game is based around cooperation. What connects our game, Summit Rush, and Peak is the goal and theming of climbing a mountain. The main distinguisher between the two games however, is that where peak is cooperative, our game is competitive.
Peak, being a cooperative game and well suited to friend groups, leans heavily on the aesthetic of fellowship. It does this, like many other games in its genre(often referred to as “friendslop” games), by giving you a shared objective, adding potential hazards, and implementing elements that create for funny moments such as proximity chat and funny items. What I believe sets Peak apart from many in its genre is the fact that not only do you and your friends have a shared objective, you also will almost certainly have to work together to achieve it. The game has mechanics such as being able to help your friends up a ledge and items such as rope that allow your friends to scale heights they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. Not only this, but you have an incentive to keep your friends alive, as not only can they help you along the way, they will also likely be carrying useful items. Additionally, if you all survive a certain level, you are granted a rare item that will improve your odds of success immensely. If someone dies however, they are allowed to spectate as a talking ghost, maybe even helping their alive teammates coordinate and progress. I love this feature because I would often find myself the last person alive, but I could still have my friends commenting and supporting me to make it to that next checkpoint. All of these mechanics create the dynamic of you and your friends working together, helping one another along the way and dividing up resources as necessary to best ensure your chances of success. These dynamics of cooperation and collaboration heighten Peak’s aesthetic of fellowship above other games in its genre where often whether or not your friends survive is often not the main concern.
A few games commonly categorized as “friendslop”
The other aesthetic of peak is that of challenge, namely in overcoming the obstinacies the game presents you with. This is where the comparison to our game comes in, as peak does challenge by giving you a set challenge and level of difficulty, and allowing you to cooperate with your friends in order to overcome said difficulty. In comparison, our part of the challenge in our game is trying to outwit and beat the other players to the summit. This is reflected in the mechanics of each game, where in peak might you fire out a chain to help your friend cross a gap, in our game you leave a trap for when another player comes along in order to slow them down. This is not a perfect dichotomy however, as like in peak, our game does involve leaving things for other players. However, while the intent of placing down something in Peak is often to help another player, in our game part of the puzzle is how to place something so it benefits you, but harms or doesn’t benefit others. Because of this, our game has a very opposite dynamic to Peak, where instead of dynamics with other players enabling the aesthetic of fellowship, they instead heighten the aesthetic of challenge.
An example of cooperation in peak
Our game is not completely lacking in fellowship however, as it includes a timer in the form of a self-destroying map(similar to forbidden island) that unites the players in a shared sense of urgency to make it in time and displeasure when an important tile gets removed. When our group played, we would often be united in worrying about whether or not a certain tile would be removed, and how any of us would make it to the summit at all. This makes it so that the game isn’t all about competition, and thus can be played more casually. This contrasts peak by having the main aesthetic be competition, while the secondary aesthetic is fellowship, whereas in peak it is the other way around. Therefore while our game and peak are both about climbing a mountain with your friends, they differ substantially in how you climb that mountain, and how your friends factor into that. Where Peak succeeds in creating a cooperative experience about working together in order to succeed, our game contrasts by challenging you not only to climb a mountain, but also to beat your friends to it.
