Peak just did something most roguelites avoid: it gave players the tools to dismantle the intended experience, then told them to go wild. The “Play It Your Way” update adds campfire autosaves, granular Custom Runs, bite-sized Mini Runs, and a handful of accessibility switches that collectively turn the mountain into a configurable sandbox.
Before this patch, Peak played by old-school climbing roguelite rules. A run was a single, long commitment. If your team mistimed a jump three biomes in, you started over. No mid-run saves, no safety net beyond your gear and coordination.
As Automaton and GamesRadar+ both highlight, that’s the friction point this update directly attacks. Now, reaching a campfire quietly drops an autosave. If you quit or wipe, you can resume from the last campfire you touched. That save persists until one of three states: you win the expedition, you lose and choose to start fresh instead of reloading, or you deliberately begin a new expedition.
Functionally, that turns Peak into a checkpointed climb, at least on the default ruleset. The emotional pitch of a run shifts from “everything or nothing” to “segment by segment.” Long sessions become a string of smaller commitments gated by campfires instead of one exhausting push.
It also answers the most basic real-world problem of a co-op first-person climber: life gets in the way. PC Gamer and Noisy Pixel both underline that this was among the community’s most-requested changes. When a game is built around multi-hour sessions with no mid-run escape hatch, it simply locks out players with limited time or unstable groups. Campfire autosaves are the compromise: the route remains dangerous, but the calendar isn’t.
The autosave alone would have been a big shift. Landfall and Aggro Crab went further. As GamesRadar+ notes, campfires are now formally “chill” zones: while you’re at a fire, hunger does not tick down and the encroaching fog doesn’t progress. You can sit there indefinitely without the world quietly killing you for taking a breather.
There is one caveat in the patch notes: the moment a scout leaves the campfire, time starts moving again. This preserves some tactical tension in co-op groups. You can’t all wander off in different directions and expect the game to stay paused; the chill only holds while you’re actually treating the camp as a base.
Design-wise, this does two things. It carves out clean planning windows for teams to talk through routes and inventory without background attrition. And it finally makes Peak compatible with short interruptions – a phone call, a kid waking up, a delivery at the door – without turning them into background damage ticks.
The uncomfortable observation here is straightforward: a lot of the original tension in Peak came from the feeling that the world never let up. Hunger, weather, and fog were always advancing. With chill campfires plus autosaves, that edge is blunted. The game is now much more playable; it is also, by definition, less relentless.
The other half of the Play It Your Way update lives at the Boarding Kiosk. Multiple outlets, including Gematsu and Noisy Pixel, point to a new Custom Run interface that exposes a surprising amount of the game’s internal logic.
Instead of just picking a canned difficulty, you can now toggle individual hazards, systems, and loot behaviors. PC Gamer lists examples: you can disable or tweak fall damage, turn hunger on or off, remove spiders, adjust how oppressive certain environmental threats are, and influence what types of items appear and where they spawn (in luggage versus out in the world).
There are also more extreme options. One of the headline examples is “Grapple Mode (Stupid),” a tongue-in-cheek setting that effectively turns rescue claws into an unlimited lifeline. Other options amount to training wheels or outright joke modes that massively reduce the risk of a climb.
From a systems perspective, this is Peak exposing its own knobs. Instead of drip-feeding modifiers through traditional difficulty modes, it hands players a granular menu and trusts them to assemble something that fits their group: a near-vanilla run with only spiders disabled for an arachnophobic friend, or a chaos climb with minimal fall damage and absurd loot to blow off steam.
The one guardrail the developers did install is achievements. As several outlets note, achievements are disabled for Custom Runs. The intent is obvious: the “real” progression and challenge live in the standard ruleset. Custom Runs are explicitly framed as an off-label playground.
Not every group is willing – or able — to commit to a multi-biome expedition, even with autosaves. That’s where Mini Runs come in. Reported by Automaton, Gematsu, and others, Mini Runs restrict an expedition to a single biome.
Mechanically, this means a much shorter, more self-contained experience: one environment’s hazards, one set of traversal challenges, and a clear end condition without the expectation of carrying on to the next zone. You still climb, still coordinate, still risk gear and progress, but the time box shrinks to something closer to a single evening or even a quick session.
Combined with campfire autosaves and chill zones, Mini Runs are Peak acknowledging co-op reality. People drop, connections fail, and schedules rarely line up cleanly. The game now supports three distinct session patterns:
That flexibility is the real “Play It Your Way” pitch. It’s less about niche modifiers and more about respecting that co-op players have to negotiate time around real life.
The update also folds in a set of smaller, but important, comfort features. One that several outlets pick out is the “Zombie Phobia” option. Instead of removing enemies mechanically, this swaps zombie visuals for something less triggering while keeping the underlying gameplay intact.
This follows a trend we’ve been seeing across horror-adjacent games: acknowledging specific phobias (spiders, deep water, certain body horror) and offering visual substitutes without flattening the entire design. In Peak’s case, players who would otherwise bounce off the undead theming now have a path in without asking the rest of the group to sacrifice challenge.
It sits neatly alongside the hazard toggles in Custom Runs. Together, they outline a philosophy: core mechanics should be configurable enough that more people can engage with them, even if the “canonical” experience remains locked behind standard runs and achievements.
The tradeoff, as always, is identity. If you turn off hunger, dial down fall damage, strip out the scariest enemies, and run in Grapple Mode (Stupid), are you still playing Peak as designed, or something closer to a sandbox obstacle course with Peak’s assets? The developers’ answer is pragmatic: if that’s how your group enjoys the game, they’re fine with it, as long as the leaderboard and achievement ecosystem are anchored elsewhere.
What makes the Play It Your Way patch interesting is not any single feature on its own. Autosaves at campfires, safe hubs, and customizable hazards are all ideas we’ve seen in isolation. What’s notable is the combination, and the timing.
Peak launched leaning hard into a tense, unforgiving loop. By rolling out this suite of options early, Landfall and Aggro Crab are effectively running a live experiment: how far can you let players bend a co-op roguelite before the shared experience stops cohering?
The achievement lock-out on Custom Runs is one line in the sand. Another is that the base mode remains untouched; all these switches sit off to the side. As Noisy Pixel’s coverage notes, you still have to opt in at the kiosk. Nothing forces you into a softened version of the mountain.
The more subtle line is social. Once a game exposes this level of tuning, the community often converges on “standard” custom presets for different goals: training, speedrunning, casual nights. If that happens here, Peak might end up with de facto new modes defined bottom-up by players, not top-down by the designers.
For now, the Play It Your Way update is best understood as Peak admitting that a great climbing story doesn’t always fit neatly into a single, punishing session — and giving you enough levers that how punishing it is becomes your problem, not the game’s.
Peak’s Play It Your Way update adds campfire autosaves, chill campfires, Custom Runs, and Mini Runs, massively reducing the time and punishment cost of each climb. Together with options like Zombie Phobia and joke settings such as Grapple Mode (Stupid), the game now lets you tune hazards, loot, and session length around your group. The important question is whether players treat these tools as a training ground and accessibility layer, or quietly adopt them as the new default way to climb.
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