The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has heart and true terrors for those brave enough to play. It does not coddle its players, but offers a challenging, bone-chilling experience with a sense of satisfaction waiting for you back at the boat, if you are lucky enough to return.
I love horror. I love being scared. I love the adrenaline rush. Few mediums capture the all-consuming feelings of terror as well as video games do, and The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has it all: the anxiety, the dread, the constant sense that something is always building just out of sight. Developer ACE Team did an amazing job with the audio design, wrapping players in a kind of torture chamber of spooky sounds and ambience.
The story unfolds as you travel between locations and track down logbooks and clues about what happened on the Camendadore and the Lazarillo, and what strange presence plagues the isles. Along the way, you’ll tussle with a variety of monsters: undead, evil birds, all things tentacled – even your own friends. Collect treasure and supplies with your companions and try desperately to make it out alive. Your sanity will be at stake as you try to discern your companions from monsters, proximity chat from whispers in the woods, and the trees themselves from other ominous entities.
As a kid who grew up playing in the woods from sunup to sundown, I can say with certainty that The Mound nails that particular kind of fear. The bugs and wildlife, the snapping branches, the blurred shapes in the distance that make you question your own judgment, it all feels painfully familiar. In game, you’ll wander around for what seems like forever searching for treasure and find yourself entirely turned around. This, paired with the looming sense of urgency to get back to the galleon, pushes players to make rash decisions and end up in a panic, dooming themselves. The forest comes alive the longer you remain at a location, cranking up the intensity of both foes and hallucinations alike.
Joining sessions with other players is the best part. It takes a certain type of person to enjoy something as terrifying as The Mound, so if you are into it, you will feel right at home with players from all over the globe. Servers can be open to anyone regardless of language, skill level, or platform. You’ll trade knowledge, tips and tricks, and stories of your haunts. In my experience, players have almost always been friendly, helpful, and validating in your shared horrific experiences. Playing with strangers, especially those without voice chat, adds to the experience rather than detracting from it, as it piles on those feelings of isolation. Once the island takes you, it then knows you, and sends your body back out to beguile your compatriots, without your control. After being downed, watch other players struggle to finish the contract or watch as the island tricks your friends into thinking you’re returning to their side, only to attack them once their guard is down. Getting killed in game removes you from the proximity chat, so downed players won’t be able to help their friends flee.
For those players who wish to play solo, gameplay is still just as engaging. Going it alone spawns fewer enemies and balances out the challenge to ensure single players can complete their contracts without being overwhelmed. The amplified sense of isolation and dread being alone out there? That’s for solo players to decide if it adds to the experience or makes it a little too uncomfortable.
Players can choose from a list of strong characters and switch between them as they journey through the jungle. My constant favorite was Fray Gaspar, a man of the cloth who seems less interested in gold and more interested in redeeming himself in the eyes of the Lord. It gave me an unearned sense of comfort to think maybe he would be spared violence with God on his side. Spoiler alert: he was not. You can also pick up survivors from around the archipelago and add them to your roster of playable characters.
H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror has always, at its heart, been about humanity’s insignificance in the face of the incomprehensible. We are small, fragile things in a universe indifferent to our survival, and The Mound taps into that primal dread masterfully. The game doesn’t waste time explaining what’s happening on these cursed islands or why the artifacts whisper to you. There’s no introductory lore dump, no main villain made evident. Instead, it’s up to you to piece together scraps of lore while something vast and unknowable hunts you through the jungle.
What makes The Mound so effective is how it captures the suffocating atmosphere of Lovecraft’s best work. There’s a heaviness to his stories. The way they pile detail on detail, drawing you deeper into enclosed spaces and isolated corners of the world where normal rules don’t apply. The Mound matches that vibe in the way the jungle presses in on you, the light never quite reaches where you need it to, and every new area feels like an increase in anxiety and psychosis. The game doesn’t bombard you with exposition or cosmic revelations. Instead it lets dread accumulate in silence: through what you discover, what you read, and what you are forced to do to survive.
As a horror fan, The Mound brings me back to a clip I once saw of Robert Eggers discussing The VVitch. The film follows a family of English Puritans who exile themselves to the North American wilderness and find themselves haunted by a witch. Eggers spoke about the wilderness almost like it was its own horrific entity. The camera panning across the forest surrounding their homestead made you feel just how isolated and vulnerable that family really is. It was vast and unyielding, tall, dark, and dense. Straying past the treeline was not only about keeping themselves safe from the witch, but from the forest itself. In a similar way, the jungle in The Mound becomes a monster in its own right. After spending too long on an island, players can hear their character’s heart pounding in their chest as they run frantically through the dark brush, fleeing from something, anything, that may or may not be trailing behind them.
One could also easily draw comparisons to survival horrors like Resident Evil 4 and The Evil Within. Tense inventory management, hideous undead enemies, and ever-building intensity are shared characteristics with The Mound, so fans of games of that ilk are sure to feel at home in this haunted archipelago.
The Mound is not like some modern horror games with long cinematic sequences and choose-your-own-adventure endings. It is enveloping. It is survival. And our puny little ape brains have a hard time separating the game from reality. More than once, I had to take a break after a few missions just to breathe and reset myself. The fear is palpable and left me trembling, even as I grew more familiar with the game and the maps. No mission ever felt the same twice. Players can choose their contracts depending on their level progress and get options with different play styles and challenges. This keeps the game feeling fresh and balances some of the difficulty, though not much.
The game is genuinely challenging. You are tossed off a rowboat and into the wild unknown with very little direction. Left to your own devices, meandering through the overgrowth, you feel lost and vulnerable. The enemies are relentless, often rising back up just when you think you have finally rid yourself of them. I found myself completely turned around, wandering off the trail and what felt like miles into a cursed forest, hallucinating and bleeding out. For larger contracts, players will be forced to spend more time than they’d like out on a mission and will find themselves bombarded with enemies. Once you fill your cart with stolen artifacts, the island makes itself known that it does not want you to leave and sends out its worst. You’ll run for your lives from swaths of monsters. But when you do make it back to the galleon, the sense of accomplishment is real. Completing a mission with friends or strangers online is almost always met with laughter and disbelief that you managed to make it out with your life and limbs intact.
As you progress, you’ll find religious artifacts left behind by previous explorations. Gather a woodworking survivor from the island, and he can craft totems in their likeness, each deity granting players a unique buff for the current expedition. You’re going to need all the help you can get. With your hard-earned coins, you can purchase other trinkets to protect you from the evil lurking, or to help fill your inventory with gold as quickly as possible. This is how players can grind toward the finish line. While the ways to permanently boost chances of survival are limited, they are true to the game’s aesthetic and can make that fated excursion into the Mound slightly less harrowing.
The Mound is not without flaw, but it seems like ACE Team is dedicated to smoothing it out. Players may run into a few minor bugs. On a couple of occasions, my friends and I ran into connectivity issues, especially when another player joined at an inopportune moment, causing lag or enemies to suddenly flood the area. One friend even had their entire progress up to that point wiped after an issue, losing their coins and perks almost as if they started anew. Sometimes, after you are killed and your voice is removed from proximity chat, you may have to disconnect and rejoin to be heard again. Some of the audio can get distorted in proximity chat as well and not just because your character is losing grip on their sanity. These are smaller issues that ACE Team seem eager to correct as the game is released. The developers were incredibly responsive during the week before launch. All of these things considered, it’s still a great game and honestly, it’s still a blast – and just really fucking scary.
The Mound won’t be for everyone. Those who dislike feeling scared or grueling challenging gameplay won’t have as good a time. But for those who dabble in horror and love to grind out a challenge, this is your ticket.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has heart and true terrors for those brave enough to play. It does not coddle its players, but offers a challenging, bone-chilling experience with a sense of satisfaction waiting for you back at the boat, if you are lucky enough return.
