At first glance, it would be easy to assume that a Lovecraftian horror expedition wouldn’t fit any of the metrics you’d expect for a good cooperative experience. But, losing your collective sanity, questioning each other’s movements, and figuring out what’s a threat to you and what’s a threat to your partner in adventuring would be distinctively within H.P Lovecraft’s realm. That’s what The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is aiming to prove, and capitalise on.

A 4-player, first-person horror experience designed to test your skills, resilience and mental fortitude, does this Cthulhu inspired game have the design chops to match the premise? Stick together and let’s venture into the great unknown to find out, or lose our minds in tandem.

Mound Your Step

Myself and Josh undertook the job of venturing into unknown lands to uncover relics and cosmic nasties aplenty. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is very clearly built with co-op in mind, with up to 3 friends joining your expeditions, or having a single bot alongside you if playing solo (should you opt for it). Additionally, there’s matchmaking available for those inclined to buddy up with randoms.

My experience of the game swung more wildly than a sailor steeped in Cthulhu’s clutches, depending on how I was playing. Alone with a bot, it became a tedious, uninteresting and borderline dull time. I figured out how to clear maps as efficiently as possible to get each run over as quickly as possible, barely being an active participant. With Josh alongside me however, things shifted pretty considerably.

Some of The Mound’s most effective visual, audio and technical tricks only shine when you’re experiencing them, but your teammates aren’t. The first time I assumed Josh was next to me (owing to his character being there), only for him to say “ugh… I’m not near you?”, my heart skipped a beat. Suddenly, we were hearing different noises, witnessing different threats, and more than once, we attacked each other before realising the developer’s fiendishly devious tricks.

The Folly of O-men

In short, playing with others is the way to go. The scares are more effective, the mechanics become more cohesive, and the integration of cosmic horror madness works far more seamlessly. I’d go as far as to not recommend playing it if you’re planning on a solo joint, unless you’re willing to matchmake. With that understanding in tow, I’d best get to telling you more about the actual game.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a run based collect-a-thon, one where you need to be careful about every decision and movement you make. You set out on expeditions to a nefariously evil continent, hoovering up supplies, occult items and food. Each mission has a minimum coin amount you need to earn to be successful. This creates the typical push-pull scenario of venturing on with lower supplies and more threatening conditions to earn more, or turning back at minimum completion.

At least, that would be the case, but The Mound provides very little incentive to pursue more than the bare minimum. Once you hit the required threshold, any further bonuses only grant a handful of more tokens (spent on consumable items). Consequently, I found very little reason after a couple of runs to stay beyond the required amount. Even having a boosted amount of XP would have likely given an added layer to this system, but as it is, I was content to get in-and-out ASAP.

Cthulhu Reigns

That’s not to say there isn’t much to discover, however. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has more survivors to discover, occult objects to find and unlock, and plenty of creative environments to uncover. There are 18 maps in total, and learning their intricacies is a big part of the initial appeal. Personally, I think the time limits imposed, given the sizes of the maps, is a bit too tight, which further incentivises skipping exploration and beelining it for your objective, but that might vary a little for others.

The primary aim is to acquire logbooks to map out new regions, which are often at the very end of maps. If you actually explore every nook and cranny, you’ll barely make it halfway before the enemy numbers tick over critical mass. There are some absolutely terror inducing special enemies, like a giant spider and a seemingly invincible stalker type, which up the ante significantly and make for some seriously adrenaline inducing moments.

Regular foes are most often humanoid, with lurching movements and basic melee attacks. Combat is pretty clunky, though I believe this is partially by design to deter you from relying on it. While I wasn’t a big fan of the mechanics, the developers have worked hard to integrate some tension building systems. Flintlocks can’t be fired in the rain (which I discovered to my dismay), the rapier falls apart like cheese on a grater, and the machete is the best invention since slicing bread with one.

Going Out of My Mound

I really struggled to pin down my feelings about the game, which may be coming across within this review. On the one hand, I have some standout moments of lauding the game’s ability to nail that loss of foundational reality that’s perfectly Lovecraftian. On the other, I found myself cursing the mundanity and repetitiveness of The Mound’s design. It’s at its best when you’re first discovering it, then quickly descends into uninteresting territory.

Contracts, for example, have tiers from basic to legendary. However, these don’t create any seemingly significant changes from how you play them. Sure, the threshold to success is higher, but when I know one map inside out and can cheese my way through it, that doesn’t matter much at all. The scares also have a limited shelf life, as once you’ve seen one trap chest, you’ve seen them all. I don’t want to be too critical, because I think The Mound does a decent job of capturing the atmosphere of the novella, but I never found myself having that itch to get out onto another expedition.

Still, if you’re into your cosmic horror experiences, and you have a group of like-minded insanity seeking friends, you could do much worse than this. The variety of maps, progress through levelling and items, and uptick in challenges as you creep towards The Mound will give you plenty of hours of content. How much of that you’ll actively enjoy might be a different story, but there’s a good amount of game here.

Omen of Bugs

Visually speaking, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a tough one. In terms of raw visuals, it’s more PS4 era, thanks to the muddied textures, stilted animations and relatively bland environments. However, in terms of atmosphere, it really nails that isolated, walls-closing-in fear that’s so evocative within the literature it pulls from. When your screen descends into darkening shades of blue because a red-eyed bird has howled all manner of hellspawn on you, it’s hard not to be impressed.

The game does a fair amount with not a whole lot, and I think that’s something to be commended. The voice work is a very mixed bag, owing to some overlapping audio when trying to listen to logbook lore, and competing sounds when in a mission. It’s very messy, but in an organised chaos kind of way.

Less forgiving is the bugs, and I don’t just mean the terrifying giant millipede thing that has a nasty habit of being vomited out of these characters. For an entire play session, water and the sea just… weren’t there. We could see the edges of the map design, which was rather disconcerting. The framerate struggled intermittently to keep up when the monsters came calling, and visual oddities were common. Though, in fairness, it was sometimes hard to discern what’s intentionally out of place and what isn’t.

A Continent of Dangerous Potential

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu left me feeling somewhat saddened. I love its attention to atmosphere and devotion to the mythos. Few games have given me an adrenaline spike or made me as paranoid of my own surroundings. Playing with someone else makes this title come alive with possibility, and that’s when it’s at its best.

Unfortunately, the solo experience is genuinely painful. Aside from this, there are some seriously flawed and rough sections in this otherwise solid effort. The map size and difficulty are more tuned to having 4 players, the combat mechanics are a chore, and it’s almost too easy to minimise the actual playing part, in favour of becoming as efficient as possible to progress.

In part, that’s left me feeling like a survivor of a Lovecraftian tale. I’ve seen too much, come back withered and worn. I may have had memories of joy or wonder along the way, but these have ceded to the madness, and left me an ambivalent husk. Venture towards these expeditions with friends, but to do so alone would be folly.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Developer: ACE Team
Publisher: Nacon

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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