PEAK
Lost nature scouts, a crashed plane and one enormous mountain: PEAK hands you a stamina bar, a backpack of questionable snacks and a summit that has to be reached before anyone gets rescued. Everything happens in first person, with hands grabbing at rock faces and a physics-driven body that can tumble off a ledge after a single misjudged jump.
You can attempt the ascent alone, although the design clearly favors a group of friends hauling each other upward and arguing about which mushroom is safe to eat. PEAK released on Steam for Windows PC on June 16, 2025.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- A different mountain every evening - At 17:00 UTC each day the island resets with fresh terrain and a reshuffled route. Groups that struggled on one layout can retry it as often as they like before the reset, then face something unfamiliar the next day. Food spawns and suitcase contents are randomized on every expedition too, even on the same island.
- Teamwork you can feel in your hands - Helping a friend is a physical act rather than a menu option:
- Grab a struggling teammate and drag them over a ledge.
- Crouch while a friend stands on your head, then jump to fling them higher.
- Hang rope spools and hammer in pitons on a tricky wall, turning it into an easy path for whoever follows.
- Shout over proximity voice chat, where a scout who wanders off fades out and an unconscious one falls silent.
- Recognized by critics and players alike - Its first year brought Best Multiplayer Game at the 2025 Golden Joystick Awards, the Better With Friends award in the Steam Awards 2025 and Stream Game of the Year at The Streamer Awards, plus a Best Multiplayer Game nomination at The Game Awards 2025. Metacritic places it at 82, a “generally favorable” rating.
Story and Lore
The setup is told almost entirely through objects. A BingBong Airlines flight has gone down on the Shore of an unnamed island, and its passengers, a troop of brightly colored scouts, wake among scattered luggage. Rescue waits at the highest point: light a flare at the summit and a helicopter comes for you.
Someone attempted this journey long before. Scoutmaster Myres, leader of troop 437 for more than four decades, left two trails of writing on the mountain:
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the Guidebook lying at the crash site, which he authored;
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his diary, whose pages turn up as scrolls beside campfires and record his own troop's stranding.
Those pages tell a grim story. Somewhere in the Alpine, Myres ate a Napberry and fell asleep, and his scouts carried on without him. The abandonment broke him. He now haunts the island as a gaunt, skeletal figure who targets anyone leaving companions behind.
Spoiler warning. The Final Ascent update expanded his thread. On Ascent 8, the troop gathers amulets from scattered scout statues, places them on the Ancient Statue at the summit and passes through Nadir, the place where Myres's soul has been trapped. Freeing it reunites soul and body, and the Scoutmaster finally boards the rescue helicopter with your scouts.
Gameplay and Mechanics
The stamina bar
One bar governs survival. Climbing, sprinting and jumping spend stamina and rest restores it, yet status effects shrink the bar's capacity until they are treated: hunger, injury, poison, cold, heat, spores, drowsiness, curse and the weight of carried items all claim a share. Once afflictions cover the whole bar, the scout collapses, and a death timer begins counting down.
The route to the summit
- Shore: the crash site, where jellyfish trip careless walkers and urchins poison anyone who brushes against them.
- Tropics or Roots: a rain-lashed jungle, or a fungal redwood forest buffeted by wind and filled with glowing pink spore clouds.
- Alpine or Mesa: blizzard-swept snowfields, or a sun-baked desert of cacti and dust devils.
- Caldera or Gloom: a lake of lava whose level rises and falls on a cycle, or a fog-bound forest leading to a tall tower.
- The Kiln or The Citadel: a vertical scramble inside a volcano as lava climbs behind you, or a tower of arrow traps and swinging maces with the Sleepy Gloom rising from below.
- Peak: the summit, where the expedition ends.
Campfires sit between stages, and lighting one clears the wall of fog sealing off the next area. On every setting above Tenderfoot, a freezing fog also starts creeping in once the group has gained enough height or after roughly 16 minutes and 40 seconds, acting as a soft time limit in most stages.
Gear and luggage
Supplies come from suitcases scattered by the crash. Standard luggage holds food, rope spools, pitons and energy drinks, while rarer Ancient Luggage hides mystical items such as the Anti-Rope, which floats upward instead of hanging down. Balloons lower a scout's gravity, and six of them used together allow brief, limited flight.
The Final Ascent introduced Clown Luggage, now the source of the cannon, the balloon bunch and the lollipop. It also brought a jetpack worn in place of the backpack, a glider for horizontal crossings and an odd Warp Fungus with an effect players have to discover by throwing it.
Difficulty and custom rules
Tenderfoot is the relaxed option: climbing costs less stamina, hunger builds more slowly, and there is no fog, no zombies and no Scoutmaster. The default Peak setting removes those comforts, and beating it opens a ladder of Ascents, each adding a rule on top of the earlier ones:
- Fall damage doubles.
- Hunger grows faster.
- Every item weighs more.
- No flare waits at the summit, and you must carry one up yourself.
- Nights turn cold.
- Climbing burns extra stamina.
- Scouts start cursed and gain more curse each time they are revived.
Custom Runs let a group adjust individual difficulty settings, hazards and luggage drops, though achievements switch off while they are active. That menu also offers Mini Runs covering a single biome of the current map. Chill Campfires, meanwhile, stop hunger and fog from advancing for as long as scouts linger by a fire.
Characters and Factions
There are no rival factions or dialogue trees here. The cast is the troop itself, plus whatever the island sends after it.
- Scouts: the round-headed, colorful player characters, customized in the Airport lobby through a Passport that sets skin color, eyes, mouth, headwear, outfit and sash. Sashes are earned by clearing difficulty tiers, from the Tadpole Scout Sash on the default setting to the Scoutmaster Sash for Ascent 8. Fallen scouts linger as ghosts who float along and watch the others.
- Scoutmaster Myres: the island's signature threat. If the highest active scout gets far above the next one, he can appear, teleport closer, seize the runaway and hurl them toward the longest drop. Blowing the Scoutmaster's Bugle summons him on demand, the only way to meet him in solo play.
- Bing Bong: the BingBong Airlines mascot, present in the game as a plush scouts can pick up and take along.
- Zombies: mushroom-infected scouts that roam the Roots on the default difficulty and above. A scout who dies with heavy spore buildup rises as a new one, and Zombie Phobia Mode swaps their appearance for players who find them unsettling.
- Big Ghost: a Gloom spirit that materializes when scouts stay too long in its fog, drifts straight through terrain and detonates in a burst of cold and blindness. Ringing a Bell Tower or raising a lit Candlestick or Faerie Lantern burns it away.
- The Looker: a rare, silent figure that peeks out from behind rocks and vanishes once a scout gets close.
- Wildlife: bees defending their hives in the Tropics, plus spiders and beetles lurking in the Roots.
Editions
Only one version of PEAK exists: the standard game. Steam lists no deluxe tier and no paid DLC, and each expansion of the island has arrived as a free update:
- Mesa update (August 11, 2025): the desert alternative to the Alpine, plus rising lava in The Kiln.
- Roots update (November 5, 2025): the fungal forest variant of the Tropics.
- Play It Your Way (March 30, 2026): a large quality-of-life patch.
- The Final Ascent (August 11, 2026): the last two biome variants and the highest difficulty tier.
The developers have described The Final Ascent as the last major content patch, with bug fixes and maintenance continuing afterward.