From the first announcement of The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, I was intrigued. The idea of playing as Renaissance explorers to the New World was novel and the sense of peril achieved through only having access to relatively primitive firearms and resources seemed like a perfect fit for the genre. Most of my prior experience with Lovecraftian games (and I’ve reviewed more than my fair share of them here) has been focused on claustrophobic single-player experiences where the isolation was a key part of the dread and horror. The Mound manages to take this sense of weakness and fear and transfer it to a multiplayer extraction-style adventure that uses a whole range of effects to make you feel uneasy.
The Mound looks great, playing on PC. The sweeping coastline vistas, the dense foliage, and creepy caves are all super detailed and are perfectly designed to hide enemies and loot which creates an essential risk and reward mechanic where you find yourself pushing forwards methodically whilst never feeling safe. Enemies initially feel quite repetitive but once you progress through the game you’ll be nostalgic for those early foes as a host of eldritch nightmares swarm you from all sides. Performance is solid and has been improved upon further in post-release patches.
Another stand-out aspect is the audio design. The forest speaks to you as you progress, whether through eerie whispers, ungodly shrieks or mimicking your party members if you stray too far from them. Voice acting is good, although there are some repetitive phrases from NPCs.
Where it really shines is when the sanity effects kick in as the threat increases. These are both visual and auditory, with the latter ranging from distorted player voice chat to full on hallucinations. My fellow adventurers and I played with the in-game proximity chat and, similar to Big Walk, this is definitely the intended and best way to play. Seeing some streamers play whilst clearly chatting to each other on Discord felt like they were missing the point.
You begin your adventure by learning that a previous expedition was lost, and so you set out to reclaim their treasures and rescue any survivors, as well as pushing further towards the mysterious Mound for yourself. The one surviving member of that previous expedition has been driven insane and is locked in the brig of your galleon. This galleon serves as your hub between missions and really adds to the period feel.
You can explore the ship and find the other player characters and NPCs as you find them and bring them back. Some of these characters add new options, such as the woodworker who can carve saint effigies that offer passive buffs when equipped to your cart, whilst others offer new characters to play as. It’s a shame that the character choices are just skins and offer no different gameplay experiences, although this does mean that there isn’t a need for the kind of min-max meta-gaming that can spoil the immediacy of many multiplayer games.
Once you’ve chosen your character you must agree on a mission with the captain and then select a part of the map to explore. These missions begin in fairly simple fashion, with most being a variety of item collecting missions to earn the target amount of gold, the main difference being in the kind of loadout you get. As you open up more areas, the missions become more complex and a range of unique objectives are added. Progress requires that you find the logbook hidden in a camp on each map and doing so unlocks the next area. This becomes a priority if you want to push forward to the Mound itself, but you can also repeat earlier areas to grind character XP and in-game tokens if you wish – or just practice and refine your teamwork and tactics.
There is a solo option included, but this takes away a large part of the fun and wouldn’t be my recommended way to play. It does feel a little easier, so can be a useful way to make some progress if you feel roadblocked or get let down by your teammates, but while the AI companion can fight off enemies they are no replacement for an actual human as they don’t seem to collect items for you. The very limited inventory space is a key part of the challenge and being on your own exacerbates this. Grabbing stuff and loading it onto the cart works well with several players though, as is clearly intended.
A range of melee weapons are available and will often be your main resort, but there are ranged options as well. Longbows and crossbows are effective and, importantly, silent when compared to the noisy blasts of muskets and pistols – they’re more powerful but run the risk of waking up the forest and don’t work in the rain. The latter issue links to one of my main criticisms with the current systems, as there were occasions when the only weapon choice was a firearm yet the weather meant that they simply could not be used. Melee weapons can sometimes be found whilst exploring so it’s more a matter of RNG than anything else but was an annoying niggle.
