ACE Team, creators of the illustrious Zeno Clash series and the impressive The Eternal Cylinder, is back with a completely different experience. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a single-player and co-op first-person horror game taking cues from the likes of Phasmophobia, The Forest, and the ever-increasing wave of “friendslop” games.
In The Mound, up to four players band together to explore an expansive jungle, taking on expeditions to further unlock parts of the map, rescue people in need of help, and gather as much treasure as possible to keep your crew happy and well funded for the next adventure. The problem is that the jungle hosts many hostile creatures, and actually reacts to your own movements and actions as you traverse through it. Even an accidental loud noise can alert the jungle to your presence, increasingly becoming more dangerous to the point where your own sanity will be affected in the process.
At an event held last week, we had the opportunity to go hands-on with The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu ahead of its release on July 15, playing two expeditions in their entirety and learning more about the development process from the team itself. If you have a steady group of friends to play online games together every Friday, this is one you should be keeping an eye on.
The Mound starts with a short mission introducing the mystery of the island, which has seen two ships, the Lazarillo and the Comendador, stranded and lost to time. The horror element is immediately apparent. You’re heading to a land lost at the end of the world, from which only one man has escaped to share the tale, at the cost of his sanity. A strange figure, the loud scream of a cosmic horror creature, and an oppressively dark jungle greet you in the first few minutes.
After this cutscene concluded, I was taken to the ship to select my character. There are four starting options to pick from – the choice is merely cosmetic, but each character has its own short backstory. Alonso de la Torre, for example, doesn’t care about gold but rather the freedom that expeditions can bring him. Leonor, on the other hand, says she killed a man in Seville and hasn’t lived a day with regret since. Yet, she was forced to make a new life for herself, choosing the seas as her home moving forward.
The next step involved picking an expedition from a map and dividing resources and equipment as equally as possible between all four of us. You can expect to find axes, which can also be thrown as a tomahawk, as well as long-range options like bows and pistols. The latter, while powerful, causes a ton of noise, and ammunition is quite scarce. While The Mound doesn’t have classes or skills, the weapons and items you pick tend to define your specific role. I went with the bow in both expeditions, as my teammates used items to try to detect nearby treasure, provide some light as the in-game day got dark, and so on.
Each expedition has different objectives that aren’t necessarily a hard mandate. In the first one, we had to search for a stranded person whose sanity wasn’t exactly stable. As such, our biggest cue to find him was to pay attention to his loud screams, right until he decided to spring a surprise attack. Rescuing him not only helped the expedition, it also unlocked him as a playable character. Then, we also made sure to grab as much treasure as possible to meet the imposed quota.
Along with your party, there is a wagon that the game controls on its own. In essence, the wagon follows you into the jungle, serving as a moving stash where you can deposit any treasure and valuables you find. It’s also the perfect place for any stranded people, as well as anyone who gets killed, as a priest on board can heal them if someone carries their body to them. The wagon doesn’t exactly follow you everywhere, so there’s also a risk of going off the main path to explore a cave or a beach’s shore if you don’t have a plan B for how to return to the wagon. Once you’re satisfied with the outcome of an expedition, you can order the wagon to return all the way to the starting point. This also means that the further you plunge into the island, the more dangerous the trip back will be.
Staying too long in an expedition is another tricky decision altogether. The more time spent, especially if you aren’t being careful about the noise you’re making, the more the jungle will be alerted to your presence and attempt to play tricks. Enemy presence is tough to deal with, from undead-type runners to strange birds that will cause noise when approached.
The Mound’s most interesting aspect, however, is in how it plays around sanity and illusions. It is possible to get hallucinations that distort communication with your teammates. In one instance, I saw another player attempting to attack me, and it turned out to be something only I was witnessing. Moreover, it is possible to encounter allies that turn out to be enemies in disguise, or to spot things in your surroundings that others can’t see. This can throw a spanner in the works when it comes to cooperation, making even the most carefully planned expeditions go sideways in a matter of minutes if you’re not careful. While it is possible to play solo, The Mound shines the most with others, especially if you’re all speaking via choice chat.
The Mound is inspired by stories of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the novel of the same name. While ACE Team is taking a number of liberties with the world, the final game will feature late-game expeditions more directly tied to these influences.
Multiplayer games of the style of The Mound tend to leave narratives on the sidelines, focusing more on creating sandbox scenarios where players will create their own emergent stories simply by playing the game and engaging with its mechanics. During this hands-on preview, ACE Team was adamant that there is a story to unravel, and that you can make progress in it as you find forts with books that unlock new areas in the sprawling map from where you select expeditions from.
Moreover, the team is making sure that the characters and the world all feel distinct from what is already available in the genre, using the aforementioned influences as a starting point to workshop and explore different ideas. In The Mound, a Spanish conquistador reads manuscripts of a story set in the past, and the game explores similar ideas from a Latin American perspective, as ACE Team is originally from Chile.
“We have a very personal experience in our history in Chile with the Spanish conquistadores arriving in this part of the world, and that also allowed us to do the forest,” co-founder Carlos Bordeu said during the preview event. “You might have noticed that it’s not the typical pinetrees that you see everywhere, we have these large trees which are called Araucarias, which are from the pinetree group, but you’ll notice they have this big stump at the top of them. They look pretty different. A lot of the plants are from this region of the world.”
The Mound is quite a different project from what ACE Team has worked on in the past, too. Whereas the likes of Zeno Clash featured combat, this was more oriented to hand-to-hand brawling rather than your typical shooter. Now, the developers are bringing some of those influences back, with enemies in The Mound being able to parry your attacks, which can make you drop your weapon. But some of the ideas behind the current project started years ago when working on Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, a third-person action game.
“That game originally we wanted to do it in multiplayer, but it ended up being a project too big for us to tackle, but the initial attempt of making that game multiplayer was the foundation for The Mound,” Bordeu said. ACE Team also wanted to bring elements of that fighting-focused game to the horror survival genre, which isn’t known for focusing on melee-oriented mechanics. Despite being completely different, this shows how ACE Team keeps on iterating on past ideas and experimenting with them in previously uncharted territory for the team.
There is no shortage of multiplayer games out there that task groups of players with doing short missions in search of valuables to meet a quota. You can see plenty of these ideas and influences in The Mound. But there is also a promising foundation, thanks to the horror element at the crux of it, and making it so hallucinations can really get in the way of your perception of the game and potentially hinder your chances of making it out alive from an expedition. If ACE Team continues to iterate on the idea and manages to strike the right balance amidst too many permutations that are randomized each time you set foot in the jungle, then The Mound could be as tantalizing as searching for treasure at the end of the world.
