Peak dev would rather you pirate Peak than play a 'microtransaction Roblox slop ripoff'

Peak was a surprise viral hit when it released for PC in June, and it's still consistently in the top 15 most-played Steam games. Like other contemporary indie breakthroughs such as R.E.P.O., Phasmophobia and Abiotic Factor, it kinda came out of nowhere. And also like those previous hits, its success has led to some flagrant clones on Roblox, which is seemingly the go-to place if you want to play a shittier version of almost any commercial game you could name in 2025.

A good example is a Roblox game called Cliff, which is "a challenging climbing game where even the smallest mistake can be your downfall", according to its description. At the time of writing it has over 7,000 active users and 59,173 "favorites" (which are basically bookmarks for Roblox users, and can therefore serve as a proxy for popularity). It's the work of Roblox developer PewStudio, who cites Peak and another game called Mountain Climbing as inspiration. "Special thanks to those amazing creators!" the Cliff description reads.

It could be taken as a nice little tribute, were it not for how flagrant the copying is. I mean, this is the key art for Cliff:

...and this is the key art for Peak:

Aggro Crab Games—who together with Landfall comprise the joint effort behind Peak—has caught wind of Cliff, and the message is pretty clear. "tbh would rather you pirate our game than play this microtransaction-riddled @Roblox slop ripoff," the account tweeted.

The Roblox game is pretty keen to mirror most aspects of Peak, including its hub area, which is navigated in the third-person. The actual climbing and exploration part is played in first-person—just like Peak—and a lot of the assets, such as the luggage at the spawn point, doesn't make any effort to deviate from what Peak does. It even has square stone columns, just like Peak. It's Roblox Peak, you know. Except its innocence is undermined by its microtransactions: you can get a climbing pickaxe for 200 robux, or a parrot friend for 49 robux, or a golden apple for 129 robux.

Here are some images from Cliff, both of which will look uncanny if you've played Peak.

Of late there's been a tonne of lo-fi, masocore-adjacent platformers about scaling impossible heights, all of which seem inspired by the viral success of Getting Over It and Jump King. You could argue that Peak is just a more friendly and more finely-honed version of those older games. But iterating on a successful genre while applying your own distinctive artistic touch to it, is quite different to just… shamelessly remaking a game in Roblox.

Developers inviting players to pirate their games is something of a PC gaming tradition. The creator of Ultrakill says you should pirate his game if you don't have the money, while the developer of Loop Hero had more complex reasons. Some devs would prefer you to pirate their game than to buy them from grey market sellers.