Peak felt like it came out of nowhere last month, but it has quickly taken the PC gaming world by storm with its hilarious co-op gameplay. 2025 has proven to be a very solid year in this genre, with games like Split Fiction in the running for Game of the Year for many players. Born as a collaboration between Aggro Crab Games and Landfall Games, Peak has an incredible development story. The game was mostly developed during a four-week stretch in an Airbnb located in Seoul, South Korea.
While Peak might have taken over Steam out of nowhere, the game has already sold over 4.5 million copies to date. The conversations and videos online at launch were more than enough to make me check out the game, and after making a few climbs with friends, it’s safe to say that Peak is a good time, albeit with a few technical issues.
Stranded With Nowhere to Go but Up
Peak sets you in a comedic world where your goal is to reach the peak of a mysterious island and get rescued. You can choose to play solo or invite up to three other players for four-player co-op madness. Right after loading in, you’re given the opportunity to customize your character through a passport. All of the available options are quite comedic, especially since proximity chat is enabled. Following a plane ride that’s cut short, you find yourself stranded on an island, with the remnants of the plane and its luggage scattered throughout. The only way to escape is to reach the top of the island, so it’s up to you and your co-op partners to find a way to reach the top.
The core gameplay loop sees you use climb using the left click to climb, reach out and pull other players with the right click, and interact or use supplies with a button of your choice. While this may sound simple, the game can be approached in whatever way you’d like, so there is a lot of freedom in how you climb to the peak.
There are a total of four different biomes that you will need to progress through to reach the top, with one final challenge that occurs inside a volcano. Each presents its own challenges and obstacles that you must overcome, requiring you to change strategies constantly in order to survive. You start at the Shore, which features a mostly basic area filled with rocks and poisonous purple objects. However, upon reaching the top and moving to the next area, the Tropics, you will find an environmental hazard in the form of rain and even thorny vines all over that will take away health if you touch them.
Beyond these, you will need to traverse through the Alpine, the Caldera, and the Kiln, which, again, present new challenges, obstacles, and hazards. I found navigating these with friends in co-op to provide plenty of entertainment, as we rushed to find the quickest route to climb the mountain while doing our best to avoid obstacles. One of the hardest challenges I faced was in the midst of a snowstorm in the Alpine biome, as the cold freezes your health bar slowly and can cause you to pass out. If you can’t find cover when the snow hits, you might find yourself like me and fall 20 feet down, shivering.
While these biomes are fun to traverse through, going through the same places each time can get boring. There’s a fantastic solution to this—the biomes regenerate every 24 hours, so you won’t be able to learn pathways and stick to them. In a way, this gives Peak almost infinite replayability, as you can get a new experience in each climb during every run you go on. Additionally, as you traverse through each biome, you have to monitor your stamina and supplies carefully. Each player has a stamina bar that slowly decreases through hunger, health, and environmental damage like ice or fire. It’s your job to keep tabs on this throughout the entirety of your climb, as lower stamina will prevent you from climbing up the mountain.
Regarding supplies, you are able to carry three items at once, with a backpack slot available to hold an additional four. Items are the key to survival, as you can instantly patch yourself up, refill your hunger, or even top off your stamina with a sports drink that’s definitely not Pocari Sweat. As you continue to climb higher into the mountain, these supplies become more and more scarce, so you might be forced to head off your intended path to seek them out.
Choose The Path You Take Carefully
Much of the fun is navigating the mountain in whichever way you choose. My co-op partners and I often found ourselves debating how we should make it up the mountain, as both right and left looked appealing at times. Regardless of which path you choose to take, it is imperative that you stick together as a group. I found myself or a team member saved by another countless times just before running out of stamina while climbing. With the maps changing continuously, this freedom of choice provides a fun challenge that will never get old, as Peak will never feature a definitive route for each biome since it’s randomly generated.
I do think that the randomly generated aspect of the game might frustrate some players, especially since some routes you decide to take might end up being a dead end. In one run, my group ended up near the top of the Kiln (the last area), only to realize that we were boxed in and had no choice but to retreat and find an alternative path. However, I find this to be part of the challenge, as it requires you to be extremely careful with your use of different tools as you ascend.
Thankfully, if you know where to look, you’ll be able to find different fruits and consumables to forage, but sometimes these can inflict negative status effects, too. As mentioned earlier, it’s essential to stay together—not just to keep each other moving, but to share supplies when needed and patch up. Especially as you keep ascending, this is critical to ensure you don’t end up a solo climber with a bunch of ghosts circling you.
While you can absolutely play Peak solo, co-op play is where the fun truly lies. It’s just as much of a chaotic mess as you might think, as you attempt to keep each other alive or are left watching a teammate awkwardly fall to their death. The game’s use of proximity chat is well implemented, as you can hear other players’ voices coming from different directions, sounding muffled or echoing depending on where they are located. I spent some time testing the game solo and found it a little boring and significantly more challenging than playing in co-op. Peak clearly shines in co-op mode, where you can rely on others and afford to fall down the mountain without getting frustrated.
I do find the gameplay loop solid, but some technical issues need to be addressed. Both my co-op partners and I experienced crashes upon launching the game, regardless of whether it was set to Vulkan or DirectX12. This occurred both upon booting the game and inside the game in the middle of a round. I also encountered quite a few hitches in areas, largely when I turned to stop myself from falling down the mountain. These are by no means game-breaking, but they can make the experience somewhat frustrating.
Grab Your Climbing Gear
Overall, Peak is a great, fun time that is worth the price of entry. While the solo experience isn’t as much fun as I’d hoped, playing co-op with friends is a blast that is sure to make some memories. The crashes and bugs I ran into did take away from what was otherwise a very polished experience, so here’s hoping the teams at Aggro Crab Games and Landfall Games can iron those out sooner rather than later. Considering the team is actively implementing patches, I feel it’s very likely to be addressed shortly. I don’t think it necessarily redefines the co-op genre, but it’s a fun and welcome package that you’re practically guaranteed to have a good time with, especially with a group of friends.
