Mountaintop Isolation

From La Lionne Publishing comes Mountaintop Isolation, a solo GM-less journaling game built using the Wretched & Alone SRD. In this spooky, horror RPG, survival and escape from where you’ve been stranded at the top of an isolated mountain is far from guaranteed. Impossible? No. Unlikely? Quite. 

Invited to a ski cabin weekend with your old high school friends, you find yourself arriving at the cabin late at night. When you wake up in the morning it is to a blizzard, you quickly determine that you won’t be able to drive back down. To make matters worse, you have no cell reception and the cabin’s landline isn’t working. With difficult themes including fear, isolation, suspense, despair, and potential death, will you survive your weekend trip?

Coming in at fourteen pages and available in both English and Spanish, Mountaintop Isolation presents its rules and prompts on a unique paper texture made by Anya specifically for this game. It is simple and effective, making the text easily legible while giving the impression of something that may well have been left behind in the cabin by its last inhabitants. 

I received a complimentary copy of Mountaintop Isolation for review purposes and will always be transparent about times where this happens! 

My Playthrough

Setup was quick and easy! I picked up a tumbling block tower specifically for this game but wound up using the alternate token rules. This is the first W&A game I’ve played, and in my mind the tower was very much part of the materials, so I was grateful this wasn’t the case! The thought of hearing the tower crumble was setting my brain on edge, so circumventing that entirely and with language going “this is an equally valid way to play” was an appreciated reassurance.

Relating to setup being quick and easy, Mountaintop Isolation gives you a template for your first entry – I copied it into my journal without hesitation. The first entry is usually the one I have the most trouble with, so having something there to get me started and break the ice was welcome! It also removed that self-imposed weight of expectation, which allowed my brain to get moving on the following entries. 

I found gameplay straightforward and didn’t run into any questions while playing. I wasn’t sure what direction my story was going to take – why my friends hadn’t arrived yet was a question I had in the back of my mind throughout, and as the days wore on it became harder to keep a cheerful outlook. There were still moments of hope, though! Just enough of it to keep my character going and pushing forward.

Now, it’s a running joke in my Strixhaven campaign that I roll terribly, and this proved the case with my playthrough of this game! This worked in my favour as there are multiple instances where you need to ‘pull a block from the tower’ which, in the alternate rules, meant rolling dice to see if I lost one of my nine tokens. I think by the end of the game I had lost two tokens, and my game ended because I drew all four Kings. 

I was very satisfied with the story! It was sad and difficult, and I felt really bad for my character and what was happening to her. The very first bit of text in Mountaintop Isolation is the content warning sections, and the game encourages you to check in with yourself as necessary. I feel like I got exactly what I was expecting from this game and had a good time playing you’re told what you’ll be dealing with, and to discard any prompts that do not serve you.

Highlights

One thing I think needs to shine in solo journaling games are the prompts, and Mountaintop Isolation really delivers on these. They’re divided into four broad categories: weather, cabin, morale, and other. My game saw me drawing a lot of weather-related prompts, which felt fitting as it was the weather that had me stranded – my character would be paying attention to those conditions! I like how there were some prompts that worked together, like the three pieces of a missing emergency radio that, if found, allowed you to send down an emergency signal to maybe get some help. Overall, your situation worsens the longer the game goes on but there were still hopeful moments provided by the prompts to keep that possibility of survival alive. 

That said, the prompts also lent themselves to that creeping sense of dread and unsettling horror atmosphere that is so integral to the game. You feel isolated. As I said, the prompts provide moments of hope, but they’re just that: moments. Fleeting moments at that. On the whole, the longer the game goes on the more difficult it is to see how you’re going to get out of this situation. It also brings up some questions about the people who invited you on this trip, and why they haven’t sent anyone up or communicated that you might be missing when you’ve been gone for (in my case) over two weeks. It definitely left my character feeling increasingly paranoid. 

One last highlight for me is the journaling method! Namely that it doesn’t need to be a journal. It never does, I guess, but Mountaintop Isolation feels particularly well suited to voice recordings or video diaries.  You can’t use your phone to call out as you have no reception, but you can use it to take notes, or voice memos, or videos for when you get back home… or so people know what happened once they finally find you. 

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for a game exploring themes of isolation, paranoia, fear, and surviving against the odds against the backdrop of an isolated ski cabin at the top of a mountain, this game might be for you. Prompts are challenging and thought-provoking, and stories will be as varied as the people writing them. 

Mountaintop Isolation is available on Itch as PWYW [here]. While it is currently available in English and Spanish, I’ve been told there are plans for further translations as well! This is La Lionne Publishing’s first Wretched & Alone game, and I’m glad that this is the first game I’ve played in the system – the concept is so grounded in the real world that it felt easy to slip into. Ski cabin weekends are something I’m familiar with, though thankfully when I’ve gone my friends have shown up (and I’ve lived to talk about them).

If this game left you feeling cold and alone, maybe you want something cozier? Tea & Toadstools [here] is a solo GM-less journaling game using the Carta system, and is funding on Crowdfundr right now! To keep up with everything Anya is doing,including cosplay, APs, and being a pro GM, you can find her [here].

Would you be interested in seeing the journals from my playthrough? Let me know below!

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