One of the best things a piece of horror media can bring to the table is perspective. Even if you’re telling a tale as old as time, it can feel fresh when seen through a unique lens. Mundaun, the debut horror game from Hidden Fields, weaves a classic deal with the devil story and steeps it in the culture and folklore of the Swiss Alps. The unique atmosphere is further enhanced by an art style that’s like none I’ve seen in a video game, but the moment-to-moment gameplay can be occasionally hit or miss.
The story begins with you going back to the titular town after your grandfather dies in mysterious circumstances. As you begin to investigate his death, you find pieces of information about a fateful night your grandfather struck a deal that now haunts the town and its residents. Old secrets are revealed slowly as you speak with associates of your grandfather throughout the area, creating an interesting set of characters and painting the picture of life in this small part of the world. The story and atmosphere are the strongest part of the game and set the mood for a powerful experience.
Further enhancing the mood is a beautiful hand-penciled art style. All the textures for the models in the game were drawn by hand, giving the character’s world a scratchy, monochrome look. This technique enhances the folklore style of storytelling, making it feel like something out of a book of dark fairytales. Not everything about it is perfect though. The muted tones occasionally allow objects to get lost in the background, and models tend to pop in and out a little more than I’m used to in modern games. But for the most part, it looks great.
There are a lot of small things going on gameplay-wise in Mundaun, but for the most part, you’ll be exploring the town and solving various dream logic style puzzles. Sometimes they involve staring at a painting or catching an image in a reflection, but most of them see the player collecting strange objects, like a talking goat head, and figuring out what to do with them. This can lead to some unintuitive leaps in logic, but generally, the puzzles are satisfying.
Since there’s no in-game minimap that shows you exactly where to go, exploration is done through a combination of a map your character draws and in-world signage that guides the players with simple pictures pointing to locations. Many times the game finds clever ways to guide the player along the path without making it feel too gamey, but that means if you miss that clue you can find yourself wandering around trying to pick up the breadcrumb that will lead you to the next step. There were times where I felt like the game encouraged exploration without properly rewarding it. Oftentimes I would follow a clue to a dead end that just had a small spooky beat but no items, which led me to wasting time searching for more stuff that wasn’t there.
The other bits of gameplay in the game are sadly a bit less well-designed and fleshed out. You spend a surprising amount of time driving up and down the mountainside, which tends to feel a bit clunky but still doable. The game also features a few different creatures that you encounter, but it never feels quite as tense as it should. You do have limited methods to fight back, but many times the AI causes the monsters to walk past you when it seems they should have seen you, breaking the tension a bit. There was also a fear system that was in the game, but it was not ever really explained. I don’t believe I ever felt any sort of effect from it, despite having a page dedicated to the meter in my in-game journal. Personally, I feel like the game didn’t gain much from having some of these systems, and it might have been a bit smoother of an experience if it had focused solely on exploration and puzzle-solving.
There are a couple points in the game where you’re presented with a choice, but this system too seemed like a bit of an afterthought. I went back and did both the choices for the ending, and the difference was minimal, though one of them hid what I thought was one of the more interesting story beats in the game. While I did appreciate having the agency, it wasn’t very additive and didn’t make me want to go back and play through the whole game again right away to see what I missed.
Despite all the rough edges, I find myself thinking a lot about Mundaun after completing its approximately six-hour story. Even though it plays a lot of the same dream-logic, space-shifting tricks that became so popular in the wake of P.T., the world felt so fresh and unique. I wouldn’t say the game was ever very scary, but it felt haunting in a way the best folk horror can. Everything about Mundaun feels so authentic that it wouldn’t be surprising to me to hear this is a tale told to children in the Swiss Alps as a cautionary bedtime story.
Mundaun review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Mundaun is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3656065/review-mundaun-effectively-haunting-folk-horror-game/
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