2026 has been a great year for games that take place on a mountain. BARDA is the latest to add to the collection. It’s a sweet on the surface watercolour inventory management roguelite that hides its challenge in plain sight. This is a game with well-thought-out systems that plays closer to a tabletop RPG than you’d expect. It also handed my arse back to me time and time again with its difficulty curve.
In BARDA, we play as a character ascending a mountain to scatter their grandfather’s ashes. Each climb sets out a different arrangement of biomes, and inside the biomes are various encounter or challenge types. In early access, there is a frozen, a volcanic, a mountainous, and a forest biome. The extreme temperatures of the frozen and volcanic biomes may freeze or set your equipment on fire, thus making those items perform… less than their peak, dare I say. This is important because absolutely every interaction you have in BARDA comes down to stats, and the equipment you carry will generate stat points for whatever they are good for. The trick is that your bag is only so big, and so you’ll need to constantly decide what items to carry and what to drop.
BARDA comes with enemies to fight, landscapes to climb, intelligence challenges to pass, fishing challenges to beat, and dark passages to light. There are other stats too, which I’ll get to, but each screen will usually have at least one of these to pass. Some are optional if you’ve got the items and think they’ll cope with the challenge, but some are mandatory to reach the next journey onwards sign and move to the next stop in the biome. Your character always has a confidence dice roll that can score between one and four points, whilst you’ll need a relevant item that can add points to the stat required to pass the challenge. So a long stick might help with attacking, but it might also have points for digging treasure. Every item also has a durability factor, so it will break after a few uses. Choosing what to use for each interaction is half the battle, and if you fail the challenge, the consequences will vary. In battles, an enemy will scratch you, which often means stealing an item from your backpack, too. Elsewhere, it might mean madness, fear, stress, hunger, or fatigue. It sounds like my day job, but in actuality, these are all status ailments that will wear down your character very quickly, and then often escalate even more quickly.
I’ve mentioned the backpack before, but the other half of the battle in BARDA is managing your backpack’s inventory. Every item is shaped awkwardly, and if you can’t fit it in the backpack, it gets left behind when you move on. You’ll be constantly shuffling with the space bar to see if you can fit everything in just snug enough to not leave a critical item behind. Hunger and fatigue are two ever-present ailments that directly impact your backpack. Each screen you progress through will add one hunger to your character. This is shown as a stomach that now resides in your backpack. If you don’t eat food to get rid of it, the stomach grows larger as your hunger grows, leaving you with less room for critical items. Fatigue is more insidious. As fatigue grows, either by failing challenges or because of biome attributes, random items in your background grow in size. That number is equal to the number of fatigue, and it’s quite difficult to relax and get rid of fatigue unless you find some powerful foods or alter your mountain climbing route to stop by campfires. If you are spooked by madness, item stats are scrambled. You might have a giant sword that deals 12 damage, but if that item is impacted by madness, it might now read as 12 climb or dig instead! Madness and fear often escalate as well, turning the next item nearby into its ailment if you don’t solve it quickly. The backpack is so well woven into the fabric of BARDA, and it’s a superb piece of game design that keeps you constantly reassessing and guessing what to do next.
Runs come with challenges that earn you skill points, and these count towards the overarching skill tree in BARDA. The skill tree isn’t very big at the moment, and it often refers to unlocking certain types of objects, like metallic objects, or unlocking characters you can meet on the mountain that act as shops or special skill givers. For example, a scout guide will give you the option to increase your bag size or give you a scout badge that will improve one specific skill. As the skill tree opens more of the game up for repeated runs, I really appreciated that BARDA gives you a way to farm those skills if you aren’t meeting specific challenges. When you get to about two-thirds of the way up the mountain, one of the scouts offers to heal you of fatigue and hunger, or allows you to return to the foot of the mountain with one skill point. I found myself using this option quite often as I knew I was too weak to make it to the top, but I wanted my run to still mean something. Taking the skill point allowed that to happen.
I enjoyed my time with BARDA and would recommend it to fans of tabletop RPGs and thoughtful roguelites. The main reason I’ve scored it as 7.5 out of 10 and not highly is purely down to the repetitive nature of the biomes and encounter varieties. After a couple of hours, I’d seen all the variants and could remember the best courses to navigate through them. All BARDA needs is a bit more variety in biomes and challenge arrangements, and this game will be set for greatness. That’s exactly what the devs are saying they want to do during early access, so I’m looking forward to playing the final result.
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