Valley Peaks Review

Valley Peaks is a wholesome game where you are a frog who works for the same company your father did back in the day. But while your father was a brilliant scientist, you don’t have those same aspirations. Instead, you’re installing his radio inventions since he disappeared, many years ago. Back when he was still around, the two of you would go to Valley Peaks and climb the mountains, meaning, many of the villagers could still recognise you.

One of the key inventions your father made was a radio system, and so it’s your job to install them at the top of each mountain. Each mountain has a different challenge, and there are different elements to explore. However, it’s also important to travel around, meet the villagers, and go to each town. That’s because you’ll learn a little more about your missing father, and you’ll see just how important climbing is to the entire community.

There are 11 mountains in total, and each one has three possible routes: blue, yellow, and red. While these colours won’t mean anything in the beginning, it’s in the latter half of the game that they make more of a difference, as the difficulty is clearer later. Personally, I found the blue routes significantly easier. As I was using my controller, I used the right and left shoulder triggers to climb; you’ll need to hold them to ensure you still have your grip, so don’t let go. I made that mistake many times. While climbing, you’ll notice that there are some rocks that will collapse within a certain amount of time, have a traffic light system, or will shove you off the mountain.

To stop yourself from being thrown off the mountain, you’ll get different gear. One of the most useful pieces you’ll get is your watch, which will allow you to slow time down if you miss an opportunity to jump. You can use this time to save yourself because if you fall, you’ll lose all the progress that you’ve made in that route. If you don’t want to get sent back to the beginning, or at least, to the base where you fell, then it’s best to utilise that where you can.

Even though I chose the more casual route, I did struggle with the more difficult mountains. It can be difficult, especially as you get more gear for completing stamp cards, that you can unlock for completing each one for the first time. By finishing these cards, you can get more equipment to make your experience a little easier, so you can unlock things like sleds, gliders, radio transmitters, and more. But, if you’re still struggling, you can also collect more gear by collecting mushrooms to then use in the villages to purchase completed stamp cards to take to the climbing vendor.

Outside of gear, you can purchase little Gacha items that you can use to customise your watch. You can also adjust the colour of the watch by finding five of each colour of juices, but these will reset halfway through, when you then have to destroy all the radios on top of the flying mountains. Yes, you heard me correctly. The mountains are flying, because Corporate would like to mine all the resources from them. It’s ridiculous, and very in tune with the rest of Valley Peaks.

On another note, you can also find nuts and bolts, which you can use to mend broken equipment around Valley Peaks, but you need to keep an eye out for them when you can. It was interesting to see how you could fix things, and you could also get more by completing challenges and just clinging to every single item you could find. This is not limited to mysterious spirits who hide in jars.

However, I have to admit there are a few flaws with the game. At one point, while climbing Mount Shroom, I was thrown off by a spiked vine, and for some reason, the camera broke. Any attempt to throw myself to the ground was a failure, so I had to reset, but outside of that, I also struggled with the map. Due to its layout, it’s easy to get lost, as while each area is distinct, there’s also quite a lot going on. I found myself getting distracted easily, and you can only unlock the map completely by finishing off the radio transmitters, and then, by deleting them. The fact that the map resets in the second half did throw me off a bit, as I’d spent so long already unlocking it, that it felt like they had upped the difficulty quite drastically.

Admittedly, this was most likely because I was bad at timing, but since I was on casual mode, I wasn’t expecting to get quite so frustrated. It didn’t help that to keep an eye out for mountains you haven’t climbed, you needed to use your binoculars by pressing down on the right joystick. When you click that, everything goes black, and you’re left with an inverse outline of the mountains, so it was easy for me to end up accidentally pressing down when I wanted to quickly save myself from falling.

Overall, I don’t think Valley Peaks is a bad game, but it’s very much for those who are fans of platformers and climbing games. As much as I want to say it’s relaxing, it was only the soundtrack that made me feel relaxed. It was challenging to find specific NPCs, as all of them had very similar dialogue structures, and I’m used to being able to tell who is talking by specific cues. It just made the fetch quests more of a burden than a fun adventure, as the only way to tell is if you happened to spot the exclamation mark in the distance.

Once completing the sidequests, you could unlock specific minigames, but the only one I managed to do was by fixing the hot air balloon and meeting the frog on Mount Thunder. You just had to shoot three balloons down, and that was all. So, it was a little underwhelming, and I didn’t feel much need to find more of the other minigames after that.

While I don’t think that Valley Peaks was quite the climbing game for me, I do think it has some positives for anyone who enjoys these kinds of games. Personally, I appreciated the level of depth in the storyline, but the difficulty spike in the latter half did make it more of a challenge for me to enjoy it.