The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review

Veteran video game developers from the Chilean scene, ACE Team, take us into the dense jungles of their home country during the time of Spanish colonisation for a co-operative first-person nightmare in The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. You and up to three mates play as a cast of unwelcome Spaniards of various colonial vocations, charting your way into the heart of darkness on behalf of profiteering companies and the Roman Catholic Church. Your goals, other than getting out alive, are to seek treasure in the form of cursed idols and logbooks providing direction inland towards the titular mound – the entrance to a fabled El Dorado-esque kingdom of riches under the cursed protection of this land’s eldritch elements. What unfolds is a series of haunted expeditions in which every breaking tree branch, clanking of armour, and (God forbid) matchlock explosion awakens the indigenous, supernatural horrors to your presence. Once the jungle is disturbed, all manner of hell breaks loose, and you cannot trust half of what you see on screen. Paranoia reigns supreme, the atmosphere is oppressive, and your compatriots might just be trying to kill you. 

The Mound adapts the Lovecraftian tenet of ‘fear of the unknown’ and largely succeeds at this for the dozen or so hours it takes before players begin to learn, know, and predict many of the horrors thrown at them. The gameplay admirably blends the two spiciest genres of interactive horror: survival and psychological. For the former, players will scrape together a rudimentary kit of weapons, healing rations, and light sources into an agonisingly few inventory slots. Upon accepting a contract, a changing array of equipment is afforded by the Company in order to extract a stipulated value of treasure in the so-called New World. Things like the weather forecast and time of day at various infil points will help players determine what expedition their gear is viable for. Tokens, earned from levelling up and completing contracts, can be used to upgrade your weapon durability and buy tools and paranormal relics. That limited inventory space is needed to also haul loot back to a wagon that attempts to trail your party’s often aimless wandering. In classic survival-horror fashion, your gear will permanently break with extended use, and the exposed firing mechanisms on your guns are borked when the rains come. 

While the survival-horror mechanics create tension by betraying the player with flimsy utility in the face of danger, its psychological horror is inventive and the game’s greatest (and wobbliest) feature. Featuring an Unreal 5-rendered jungle dense with shrubbery and foliage, the untamed environments will confuse players and make it extremely easy to get turned around and split up from the team. Sound is every bit as important as sight in determining direction, and even the enemy AI can imitate player-made sounds to mislead the players. There is no reliable in-game map, compass, or means of intuiting direction. Once players inevitably break off due to factors mundane or malevolent, their sanity starts to degrade. Your vision distorts. You see blood rain, zombie-like creatures, and phantoms where others don’t. You can whistle to try to locate your friends. They can whistle back, and you follow that sound in the hopes of reunion. You feel relief to finally track down a lost mate, before realising it is instead a convincing bot-controlled mimic, which then pounces upon you and causes you to all but die from bleeding. If you panic and begin to run, you risk creating noise, which can awaken the jungle and kick off an altogether wild state of pandemonium for everybody. Masses of bodies rise from the dirt and unspeakable monsters attempt to eat you, possess you, and spook you so much that your character passes out and wakes up on the other side of the map. The only thing you can trust is the sound of your mate’s voice over proximity chat. Failing that, you might happen upon a salt trail left by the party’s wagon, which might lead to relative safety. The Mound is relentless in the best ways. Will your sanity erode first, or your character’s?

Proximity chat being the only reliable method of coordination in The Mound is exemplary. It takes only a couple of seconds of distraction to become lost and separated from your buddies. The prox chat is spatially tuned to give players a relative sense of direction from one another, and the game takes full advantage of this. This jungle contains various hurdles to impede this fragile tether, such as cave systems that produce some of the most convincing echoes I’ve encountered in gaming. There is also genuine humour in suddenly hearing a player in the distance desperately trying to Marco Polo their way back to safety, or attempting conversation with a mimic followed by screams and gunfire. 

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu succeeds while it is unknowable. Alas, for players to reach the actual mound and thus the endgame, most of its bag of horrors will be learned and lose their efficacy. After obtaining enough logbooks and having charted far enough inland to reach the mound, players are then forced to retread a bunch of levels all over again. Repetition is a problem, but worse is the lack of compelling tension. No longer do players need to scour far and wide to gather various treasures. Instead, each expedition is now in search of a single, hidden treasure per level. Find five of these to unlock the mound proper. Some hidden treasures are obtuse, and all can be tackled methodically while skirting around the now-learned traps and pitfalls of familiar locations. It feels like a chore, with the aforementioned scares becoming tepid because these redone treks throw nothing new at the players. 

The finale itself, which I won’t spoil, is disappointing to say the least. It initially presents as something similar to a raid, like in Destiny. A whole new location unlike anything seen previously. It gives the impression of higher stakes, with new enemies and puzzle mechanics. But as soon as players cross the initial hurdle of this area, they are hit with a cutscene and the credits roll. 20 hours culminate in what feels like a facade and a tease.

Much of The Mound feels precariously taped together. The often beautiful jungle is often undone by unstable frame rates and a floaty first-person camera that will make the strongest soldiers a bit motion sick. The predominantly melee combat has terrible hit detection and feedback, often resulting in flailing machetes and cheap deaths. Heaps of crashes and, oddly, missed or mistaken input registration when playing on PlayStation 5. The inventory management isn’t good, with no easy way to split item stacks or rearrange their order without dropping each individual thing one at a time. 

Funnily enough, the abundance of glitches sometimes works in the game’s favour, much like in this year’s phenomenally well-written Pathologic 3. Most of the time you simply cannot be sure if an item has despawned or been lost in the tall grass, if that character model in the distance is meant to be floating away or is an apparition, or the geometry clipping is due to simulated psychosis or poor quality control. During that phase of uncertainty, the jank works in favour of the subject-specific psychological horror. Once players naturally begin to decipher the game’s unspoken rules, those bugs quickly become frustrating. Controller-in-hand, The Mound is not terribly difficult to play, but the survival challenge is unforgiving and cheap losses to busted gameplay are hard to forgive. Lastly, it probably goes without saying, but this won’t be compelling for solo players. Bring communicative teammates, or suffer the whims of the land’s eldritch machinations.

Final Thoughts 

The Mound occasionally shows great success as a co-operative horror title. Being unable to trust whether your teammates are corrupted and controlled by the computer, or are just behaving strangely due to their character’s individual perception of the jungle’s horrors, is unique and terrifying. The environments are detailed to a stress-inducing degree that effectively elicits paranoia and panicked directionlessness. Its gameplay loop of hunting for treasure while attempting to chart a course into the titular mound is edifying. That is, until you reach that point and the previously stated accomplishments begin to fade into repetition and frustration in service of a bloated and underdeveloped endgame. There’s at least a dozen hours of near-great game here, but ACE Team don’t seem to have a compelling reason for why players should see this experience through to the end, or why they would want to return afterwards. It also suffers from two common co-op multiplayer pitfalls: a constant weariness provoked by incessant glitches, and the necessity to bring mates (or clear, communicative strangers).