Peak

Steam darling Peak’s latest patch changes the game for Steam Deck players and speedrunners who love nothing more than a good glitch.

Peak version 1.25.a makes a few major changes and a bunch of minor ones. The biggest alteration is that the game is now Steam Deck Verified.

“Finally…..the game is good on Steam Deck,” the team wrote in the patch notes. “Deck players will know it’s been good for a while! The Mesa Update added the last of controller support needed and with this patch we’ve added some text adjustments needed to get the Verified badge.”

There are a whole bunch of fixes and adjustments as well. Most prominently, it’s much harder to glitch your way to the top of the mountain than it has been over the last couple of weeks.

“Made fog walls taller so you can’t shoot over them to win the game in a minute with the Scout Cannon exploit,” Team Peak wrote. “A lot of you asked us not to change the Scout Cannon but no promises were made about the map.”

Previously, players could use the Scout Cannon to blast themselves so high that they were able to clear all five of the game’s biomes and reach the goal at the peak. With the fog wall change, cannons can still send players ridiculously far under the right circumstances, but they’re now much more likely to smack into the wall of shifting fog that separates each biome and fall to their deaths. That said, we did manage to use the cannon to clear at least a couple of biomes before crashing back to earth when testing the update, so ridiculous cannon stunts remain possible.

Interestingly, this patch also added the ability to toggle off The Looker, a character who could randomly appear behind certain rocks, and who would disappear if you got too close or looked at them for too long. Even if you do leave the feature enabled, the character’s appearance will be more rare moving forward.

One issue many Peak players have run into is that a bunch of the game’s merit badges, tied to its Steam achievements, don’t seem to unlock, even after doing everything required to earn them. Those issues have been resolved for the Cool Cucumber, Plunderer, Clutch, and First Aid badges.

Other issues addressed in this patch include problems with beehives (insect phobia textures work now, and you can’t put beehives into your backpack anymore), alongside several balance changes (hot rocks in the Kiln now damage players correctly, the Cure-All item can cure some thorns in the Mesa biome, and the Magic Beanstalk is faster to climb).

Peak is the latest and one of the best examples of the genre that gamers have began to lovingly (or not-so-lovingly) as “friendslop”–relatively simple co-op-first games that include an element of humor, such as R.E.P.O. and Lethal Company. Getting to the top of Peak’s mountain requires skill and knowledge, but things like exploding spores, the fact that you can lose consciousness and fall off the mountain, and lots of other hazards, are undeniably meant to cause laughter.

Peak has sold over 10 million copies on Steam according to Geoff Keighley, and has recently added features like a Mesa biome, cannibalism, and more.

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