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The article under discussion, titled "Climbing Escher's stairs: A way toapproximate stability landscapes in multidimensional systems" (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007788), has captured our attention due to importantmethodological limitations that we believe warrant discussion. Our aim inwriting this Formal Comment is to bring to the attention of potential readersand users the following key points: 1. The construction of the potentiallandscape function necessitates the global integrability of the velocityfunctions. However, the decomposition method outlined in this article is onlyapplied to the Jacobian of the velocity functions instead of the velocityfunctions themselves, which leads to path-dependent integrals. Such acharacteristic is not desirable for a potential landscape function. 2. In thearticle's implementation, integration is conducted along the x- and y-axes.This approach renders the decomposition method, which primarily affects thenon-diagonal elements in the Jacobian matrix, ineffective. 3. We provideevidence that removing the core step of the method, the decomposition process,in the rolldown package (now renamed as waydown), results in identical output.This finding highlights the ineffectiveness of this crucial implementationstep. 4. In our Comment, we also offer recommendations for potentialalternatives for readers interested in constructing potential landscapefunctions.

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