Peak's New Zombies Get Nerfed 24 Hours After Launch as Devs Admit Playtesters Were Too Good
Scaling irony: the game’s own creator forgets how to climb, turning a routine session into a viral faceplant and a rethink of the tutorial.
Peak added zombies to its new redwood biome yesterday. Today, the team already nerfed them. Turns out undead campers were a little too good at ending your climb.
Quick catch-up: The Roots update
Yesterday, Peak launched The Roots update, a bigger-than-it-sounds patch that dropped a new biome called Roots. Picture a towering redwood forest stuffed with oversized mushrooms and unsettling bugs. And, because why not, it also introduced zombies — specifically the shambling remains of climbers who never made it to the summit. Fun idea on paper. In practice? They started chewing through runs.
One day later: hotfix time
'We want them to feel properly terrifying for, well, a zombie, but they are clearly feeling like too much of a constant run-ender in the area and deserve to be nerfed a bit and show up significantly less often.'
That is the devs explaining why the very scary newcomers got dialed back almost immediately.
What changed in the hotfix
- Spawn points: reduced, so you will see fewer zombies overall.
- Speed: lowered, so they close the gap less aggressively.
- Aggro radius: tightened, meaning they will not spot you from as far away.
- Tenderfoot difficulty: zombies are gone entirely on that setting.
The team also addressed the predictable 'did you even test this?' replies with a bit of gallows humor: they did, the playtesters were just too good at the game. It reads like: we saw the risk, but it did not bite our best players as hard as it did everyone else.
Even the studio got spooked
The admin of the Landfall account (Peak is their project) posted their first zombie encounter on November 6, 2025 — complete with a lot of swearing and the all-caps confession: 'I FORGOT HOW TO CLIMB !!! IN OUR CLIMBING GAME !!!' The caption boiled down to 'it is so scary' with a crying emoji, which, honestly, tracks.
Side note: their current design vibe
If you have been following Peak and Landfall lately, this fits their whole playful-experimentation era. The studio has been talking about 'friendslop' — their word — and said 'We proudly wear the friendslop badge' while citing research into what makes hangout-heavy games (they name-check titles like REPO) actually fun. Zombies in a serene forest climb sounds ridiculous until you remember that is exactly the kind of chaotic social friction they like to slip into otherwise cozy loops.
Bottom line: the zombies are staying, just tuned down so they do not delete your run every other climb. Which is probably for the best. I like my panic in controlled doses.