Some games win you over with their systems or with their narrative ideas, but it’s often the visuals that will dictate whether or not we are immediately attracted to something. In that ilk, Mutter is stunning. This horror indie title coming out of Santiago, Chile, manages to evoke the stop-motion styling of Coraline and mixes it with the sinister, discordant dread of Little Nightmares, crafting a cloying atmosphere that grabs you from the first few moments you spend with it.
We got to go hands-on with Mutter at Digital Dragons, ably led through it by 3D artist Matias Herrera. Obviously, I had to ask him about the visuals first, and as I played he told me, “We always loved the old stop-motion movies, Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and the Leica films, so that was our childhood inspiration by way of Little Nightmares. We like to call it ‘mood horror’. It’s not the screamer type of horror, it’s the ambience.”
You’re dropped into the demo outside a rundown cottage, with the young protagonist Maddox set to look after his unwell mother. She calls to you from the house, tasking you with performing a series of jobs, starting with watering the flowers, and expanding to cook a warming pot of soup to help with her illness.
There’s no clear narrative context here, beyond a mother and her son, but you can tell that there’s something off, not least when Maddox’s mother yells at him that he’s taking too long, her gentle voice breaking into something much more sinister. Maddox himself seems unwell, with heavy red rings around his eyes suggesting that he’s both exhausted and been crying recently. He’s scared, stammering and stumbling his way through the tasks he’s been set.
The narrative context becomes all the more interesting, with Mathias explaining that, “This is a war story, not focused on the world, but on the victims of the war. It’s about a little child with trauma who lost his father, who now lives with this existential dread of the world.” He continues, “And then, obviously, it’s the mother character. Something awful has happened there, so the child has to heal the mother, or at least try to.”
You see the faded pictures of a happy past life hanging on the walls of the decrepit house, and it’s fair to say that I absolutely had to know more. The big reveal comes when Maddox has found all the ingredients and cooked the healing soup. Holding it out to his mother’s door, there appears the silhouette of a giant, spider-like creature taking it from him. The horror of the war, the twisted remains of a once-loving parent? It’s a great visual metaphor, and one that fits perfectly with the stop motion aesthetic.
While our final moments with Maddox see him rushing off into the foreboding woods in search of his dog Bearkuff, the quality of this small portion of the game is clear to see. The voice work is excellent, with Gia Kri’s fearful take on Maddox proving the perfect counterpoint to Kiara Littlejohn and her both monstrous and gentle take on his mother, while the tonal atmosphere of Gianluca Faccilongo’s music perfectly carries the darkness and dread through to the demo’s conclusion.
Mutter is very much in early production, but it’s clear that there’s something special here already, with the team taking home first place at the recent Digital Dragons Indie Dragons Awards. While they seek out a publisher, the team are, just like Maddox, continuing to move forward, and you have to hope that there’ll be joy and happiness at the end of both of their journeys.
