Cairn: Is It Zooey?

When I was younger, I was obsessed with climbing things. In my neighborhood, I was always known as the kid that was willing to climb the biggest trees the farthest. When I got a little bit older, this turned into wanting to climb buildings. At night, when I was up with my insomnia, I used to find different buildings I could either climb from the outside, or break into to try and see if I could find access to the roof. There's just something about getting to the top of things that I always found enthralling. I think it's the distance you are from everything below you. Everything gets so small. You stop feeling like those things on the ground matter. They're just.. things.
 
 
Nowadays, my love of climbing things has turned into a love of hiking. I really enjoy trails that cut through mountains, every step taking you further and further from the towns and cities and roads, and into a wild that slowly becomes more and more inhospitable the higher that you climb. I've had the privilege of doing some really amazing peaks. From Mount Wilson in Red Rocks, to Guadalupe Peak, to Clouds Rest in Yosemite, all of those hikes were experiences that left me exhausted, sore, and also totally breathless.
 
 
But, I've never really done actual rock climbing. I've always had such a fascination and respect for people that do climb. I could never be the kind of person that climbs a cliff face with nothing but ropes and pitons and some chalk for good measure. To face a mountain with nothing but your whole being, it requires heart and grit and determination far beyond what I'm able to muster.
 
 
Even then, sometimes I think about climbing. That feeling of satisfaction that I felt getting to the top of some of the peaks that I have is incredible. What must it feel like to put your life on the line to climb, giving your everything just to make it to the peak? How small and inconsequential must the world feel then? 
 
 
Cairn is a game made by The Game Bakers, released in January 2026, you take the role of Aava, a mountain climber. At the start of the game, she's already one of the best climbers in the world. But, she's still got one more goal in front of her. Kami, a mountain that nobody has ever been able to summit before. That's not to say that plenty haven't tried. Kami has been the final resting place of plenty of the best climbers before her. But Aava is a climber, through and through. She has no choice in the matter, she has to climb. She is determined to do it, and so she will. She doesn't question it. It doesn't matter that people say it's impossible. It doesn't matter that everyone that's tried has failed. She needs to climb that mountain, because to not is to give up on everything she is.
 
 
This is how I feel about myself in relation to zoosexuality activism. I know, weird transition, but hear me out. I think about the goal of social acceptance for zoos in the same way that Aava feels about climbing the mountain. I'm told all the time, both by zoos and non zoos alike, that it's probably impossible. And I mean, yeah, it's certainly not going to be easy. Maybe it really is impossible. But honestly, to me it doesn't really matter. All I know is that there's a part of me that's determined to try. And I think I really relate to Aava in that regard.
 
 
Cairn is an incredibly hard game. As it should be. Climbing a mountain is not easy, but especially so when it's a mountain nobody has ever fully climbed before. And the mechanics of the game reflect this. You have to do more than just hold up and press a button. You have to plan out your route, pick your hand positions carefully, you have to be absolutely sure when you move forwards or you'll quickly find yourself falling. Thankfully, you've got pitons, little hunks of metal you can screw into the wall, to stop you from tumbling all the way down to the bottom. But, those take time and energy to set up, and have to be frequently moved as you ascend. So best case you lose precious time and energy as you fall to your last piton, worst case you fall to your death.
 
 
Trying to do activism is kind of the same. This is something that takes a ton of work, and the risk is really high. It only takes one accidental photo upload, or trusting the wrong person, and our lives might be totally ruined by someone who wants to punish us for trying to scale the peaks of social normality. If we get doxed, it's likely that we don't outright die. Maybe we will end up losing our friends, jobs, our sense of a normal life. But at least in Cairn you can save the game and reload. Life doesn't have that option.
 
 
In Cairn, you've gotta do more than just climb though. Ascending the mountain takes days, if not weeks of time. You've gotta drink, eat, sleep, stay warm, watch your health, take care of your fingers. Climbing is about more than just going, it's about keeping yourself alive to be able to go. And that can be just as complicated as the climbing itself. The climbing is difficult, but being able to keep climbing is just as hard.
 
 
Similarly, just because we're doing activism doesn't mean that life stops. We've still gotta eat, drink, sleep, stay warm. We've got responsibilities, rent to pay. We've gotta be good friends and partners to the people we care about. We're not doing this full time, we've got jobs to work.
 
 
Cairn isn't just about making it to the top of the mountain, it's also a story about the kind of person that decides to make the impossible happen. Aava isn't normal. And not just in the way where she's able to fold her body into impossible positions occasionally to make it to that next hand-hold. She's also someone with no self-doubt. She was born to climb mountains, that's all she knows. Throughout the game you get messages left for you by people you knew down below. Your manager calls to ask for updates about your progress that he can give to the sponsors. Aava doesn't really care. She's not doing this for money. Aava also gets calls from her girlfriend Naomi. At first, these calls are a source of comfort. To some degree anyway. She calls to wish Aava happy birthday, and give her updates on life back at home. But Aava slowly starts to resent these messages, and equally, Naomi starts to grow confused as to why Aava needs to keep climbing.
 
 
This is where I think we can have it easier than Aava. We might be trying to scale a metaphorically mountain just as tall, but we don't have to be alone in doing so. Every single one of us can be a part of the journey, and we can all be the next handhold, the next push up, the next burst of energy that gets us over this ridge. We don't need to take on this battle alone. We can do all this together.
 
 
There's a quote that Aava says towards the top of the mountain to another climber that's doubting himself. He asks her if she's scared of dying during the climb. She replies 
 
 
"I was born on this mountain. There was nothing before, there will be nothing after."
 
 
This rings extra true for most of us. We're born as zoosexuals. We had no choice in whether or not we want to be on the mountain. All we can choose is how we deal with it.
 
 
Some people may want to turn around and go back down the mountain. They prefer to be somewhere safe and bunker down. To live the life they can live and be as happy as they can be about it. But leaving the mountain means to sacrifice a part of themselves. And, even then, the mountain will still reside somewhere within. It's impossible to completely stop being a zoo, no matter how hard you try.
 
 
Conversely, climbing to the top will take so much more from you. Even if you climbed the mountain for your whole life without missing a single step, never slipping once, you may still never even reach a summit. And even if you succeed, it would probably not even matter at that point.
 
 
So, if either case is bad, what's the point of it then? Aava struggles with this question the whole game. She's asked by her girlfriend, by other climbers she meets, and towards the end she even asks it to herself. Her answer is one of frustration. She doesn't actually know why she climbs.
 
 
For me, however, I know why I climb. It's for the small moments. The inconsequential ones. When you finally crest the lip of a hard climb and see a beautiful lake that reflects the clouds, which are so low you feel like you can reach out and touch them. When you get to sit in a cave next to a fire, watching the stars more clearly than you could ever see them from the ground. Every time you fall, it feels miserable. But every time you get just one foot further than the last time, it feels euphoric. The peak might be the destination, but that doesn't mean that it's the only part of the journey that matters. 
 
 
Being an activist sucks sometimes. It's hard, it takes up so much of your life, it adds so much stress on top of all the other stress that just comes from existing. But the small and the inconsequential are what keep me going. I've had the chance to sit in rooms with zoos and talk and laugh and share stories, and that's felt better than any of the countless other times I've done the exact same thing with other people. How good is it going to feel if we can actually start a national conversation around animal autonomy? Wouldn't that be incredible? To make the lives of animals everywhere better? I think that's worth climbing for. What if we could finally make society understand human animal relationships aren't innately harmful. I'd climb to try and achieve that goal too. And if we ever actually made it.. I don't know how to even describe how that would feel, but I know it's something I want more than anything. 
 
 
Along the journey up Mount Kami, Aava encounters a number of bodies. Skeletons of the people who tried to climb before her and didn't make it. From them however, she finds food, resources, maps, tools. Things that help her push forwards just that little bit further. This is true for us too. Just because you choose to climb doesn't make it safe. People are going to die on the mountain. We've lost so many zoos in our journey. But, these are the people that help us move forwards. We respect them by continuing to try.
 
 
There's a point at the final respite where Aava has the option to go back. After facing everyone telling her to give up, she really does think about it for a moment. You as a player can actually decide to end your journey at that place, rather than make the final push towards the summit. You've already come this far, what are you trying to prove by risking it all? 
 
 
This isn't painted as the bad ending. You get to see once more the things you've encountered along the way as you make your way down the mountain to the roll of the credits. You get home and return to your girlfriend, your friends, your real life. It's obviously not bad. It's just fine. In fact, if you look online, this ending is what a lot of people would consider the "good ending". A character so driven by a need to ascend finally realizes that what she really wanted was on the ground all along.
 
 
But by doing so, Aava sacrificed a core part of her being. What now that she didn't make it to the top? What will she do if not for the thing she set out to do? By giving up on it, she will never fully come to terms with herself ever again. And maybe that's fine, and fine is just enough. She doesn't have to prove what's possible and what isn't. She doesn't need to be defined by the fact that she is a climber, doing something that may cost her everything. And in the same way, we don't necessarily have to try and change the world. We can just be. But is that really enough? Is that a life you'd be fulfilled by? Or will you forever be haunted by the mountain? By the question.
 
 
This thought terrifies me to my very core. Sometimes I lay awake, thinking of being on my deathbed surrounded by people who love me, and yet don't even know who I really am. Or, if they do, they're unable to share the things that I cared about the most. I'm already terrified of death, but I'm much more scared of dying having not tried to see the top than I am scared of getting killed on the climb itself.
 
 
This article is called Cairn: Is It Zooey. And I think the answer to that is definitively no. There's no reason to think Aava or any of the other characters are zoos. But, while playing this game I couldn't stop thinking about how much the game reflected my own feelings about what the thing we're all doing together is. The game felt so personal to me. And maybe that's just because climbing is such a simple thing to analogize. But few games have connected me to the feeling of being a zoo in such a way that Cairn did. 
 
 
It took me a lot of frustration and a lot of effort, but eventually I did make it to the top of the mountain in Cairn. And the journey was well worth it. But as I close the game and delete it from my hard drive, all I can think about is the mountain in front of me. I'm going to climb until I die, it's just who I am. And despite everything, I hope that you all join me as well. You don't have to spend your life climbing, but every time you push us forwards, we get just a little bit closer. And that's so important. Because this mountain is beatable, but it can't be climbed alone. 
 
 
I want to know what it's like to look down on the problems that zoos face today from above. To see them shrink into the distance until you can't even recognize them anymore. And I think that's a goal worth climbing for. Do you? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (September 2026)
 
 
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Also please play this game if it sounds interesting, it's really good :)