Jusant doesn't so much do away with the cliche of the video game vista as reorient it. Instead of giving you a stirring panorama to gaze upon, it fixes your view on the vertiginous mountain stretching above and below, your task being to guide a quiet, androgynous character across its rocks and ridge-splitting crevasses. Instead, it homes in on the challenge of navigating in the here and now, one dusty handhold and firmly lodged belay at a time. The magic of Jusant lies in its ingenious control scheme. Each outstretched hand is controlled by one of the shoulder buttons; hold and release the shoulder buttons in tandem and you start to build a thrilling sense of fluidity, scaling the cliff at a considerable rate of knots.

For those whose feel the call of the mountains, video games have proved abundant recently: Death Stranding, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Sable all feature enticing summits, enveloped in clouds, with makeshift rock-paths towards them. Now there is Jusant, the latest title to turn vertiginous traversal into a puzzle, inspiring wanderlust from the comfort of the sofa. It is the new game from Don't Nod, the French studio behind the hit adventure series Life Is Strange. Rather, all its talking is done through dizzying, gravity-defying action. Co-creative director Mathieu Beaudelin wants to give players a taste of being an elite climber, he says, to become one with the massif.