The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu was provided by Nacon for review. Thank You!
Horror games aren't usually my jam, so I was a bit nervous when picking up The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, promising to be a Lovecraftian-inspired horror game mixed with first-person extraction-style gameplay. Select your expedition, head off in a boat, get as much loot as you can, and escape before the forest claims you.
While The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu can be played with up to 4 players in co-op, I was doing this one solo, and I was given an AI companion to assist me in my expeditions. I'll start right away by saying that you probably want to be playing this one in co-op. You can play the game solo, but the AI in the game is... a bit dumb.
A cart accompanies your members on their expedition to deposit the loot you find, as well as help guide you somewhat if you get lost thanks to a salt trail left by the cart. The problem is the AI pathfinding in the game leaves much to be desired. Your NPC companion, the cart, and even the enemies sometimes don't seem to know where you are, or where they should be going. The cart tries to follow you, but I often found that it had pathed far away from me. The NPC companion also sometimes goes astray, which is problematic in a game where you need allies to defend you against certain enemies.
This also makes it pretty difficult to play the game solo. You're expected to reach a quota for acquired loot per expedition, but collecting enough loot solo is very difficult, as your NPC companion rarely finds loot by themselves, as another player would. You also only get granted 1 AI companion, which is strange when the game can be played by up to 4 players in co-op.
The gameplay itself has good and bad points. The "horror" aspect of the game mostly takes the form of how your environment plays with you. The forest is "alive", and your actions will determine how it reacts to you. Creating a lot of noise will cause you to get attacked sooner and more aggressively. The enemies you'll encounter and this dynamic way of handling it all is definitely the highlight of the gameplay, and creates a sense of urgency that you need to "get in and get out" of the expedition.
The combat feels OK, but is fairly basic. You have a couple of melee weapons and a couple of firearms, depending on the mission you embark on. Firing a weapon is mapped to the A Button, or Spacebar by default, which is very strange. Gear, meanwhile, is selected for you by the game; you don't get to choose for yourself, which is a shame. And although you can upgrade your gear, everything you take with you on a mission gets returned at the end of the mission, so you'll need to upgrade all your gear over and over.
This lack of agency transfers into the range of movement you have in the game, namely, you can't jump, nor can you even vault over objects. There are very few situations where you can do anything but walk and sprint; mostly ladders and certain ledges can be interacted with, but you often find yourself impeded by small ledges that your character cannot surmount, resulting in you having to take a lengthy, frustrating detour to reach a place right in front of you.
The story is told in the form of narrated logbooks that you collect as you progress deeper towards the island; they are quite lengthy (usually a couple of minutes each) and can be optionally played when you finish an expedition, so you can technically skip the story entirely if you wish, just like the developers skipped any sense of gear or character progression you might want in the game.
One area where The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu does shine is the environment. The game does a great job of presenting a dense jungle to you, while still leaving room for somewhat varied environments within that jungle. Thick foliage and rocky cliffs reduce vision to the point where you often can't see more than a few feet ahead of you, leaving room for ambushes and making you feel constantly on edge about what might be around the corner. Add in some dense fog on certain expeditions, and you really do feel like you are on an abandoned, cursed island where you don't belong.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu seems to suffer from poor optimization, even on my RX 9070 XT PC. Playing on High settings at 1440p with FSR on Quality mode, I was unable to maintain 60 FPS, with GPU usage stuck at 100%. Given that the game isn't hugely impressive graphically, that was disappointing.
Also, because the game is primarily designed as a co-op experience, the game cannot be paused, even in solo games, which can be awkward as expeditions often take around 30 minutes to complete.
While The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu does carry the "Unsupported" rating on Steam, I believe you can technically play the game on the Steam Deck. Controls work fine, although inventory management was a little fiddly, but that's just the way the game plays. The game also does run at 1280x800, taking full advantage of the Steam Deck's display.
As for performance, the game does struggle on the Steam Deck, but with low settings and AMD FSR on Ultra Performance mode, you can get the game to run at 30 FPS for the majority of the time. The visuals aren't great, but it is playable.
Specific areas can drop the frame rate into the high-20s, especially when the weather is dense fog, but most of the game did run at 30 FPS. Whether that's playable or not is up for you to decide. Personally, I found it playable but slightly unpleasant, and if you do have any other device to play the game on, you should probably use that instead.
Power draw was on the higher side, given that the Steam Deck is pushed constantly by the game. Expect a draw of around 19W-21W, thus giving us a battery life of around 2.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 1.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were around 70C throughout.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu supports some accessibility features. There are subtitles for voiced dialogue. Also, when you first boot the game, you will be asked to choose between Cinematic and Normal camera modes. Normal reduces certain visual effects such as camera rotation and camera lag, so if you suffer from motion sickness, choose that. You can also adjust camera shaking, FoV, and the size of subtitles.
Interesting concepts and a solid presentation don't do enough to save The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu from a sense of being rushed, with its lackluster gameplay and poor progression.
Performance on the Steam Deck is rather poor. It is playable, but you'll need to make serious visual compromises and expect occasional dips below 30 FPS. The controls do work well, though.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has some interesting ideas and a solid presentation, but no sense of progression and some unpolished gameplay leave much to be desired. Coupled with poor Steam Deck performance means this isn't one I can recommend.
