Munduan feels as if it is held together by tape and will unravel at any moment. Movement and animations stop and start with sharp twitches and weapons shiver in your hands. The hand-drawn textures wrap around the low-poly world with uncomfortable tension, like crude sketches over cardboard backdrops.

Exploration of the world evokes Highway 17 meets Resident Evil. Instead of a buggy you commandeer a janky old harvester and instead of safe rooms you take refuge in safe houses, welcoming spaces for brewing coffee and tending to your journal. Creatures wander the landscape in a quaint manner, almost like mobs populating 90s platformers (recalling my childhood fear of evading the enemies of Croc 2 or Gex).

Supernatural events take shape in the world in the form of optical illusions, animated shadows and altered reflections, taking a similar approach to the hard artificial limitations of the artwork. The sound design gives texture to every object in your inventory, and the soundscape of the mountains is full of ambient winds and eerie stillness. “Close up sounds” (according to their sound designer) bring to life paintings and photos(?) found in the world, hinting at muffled voices from the past.

Mundaun is easily one of the best games I've played in recent years. I love movies just as much as I love games and the way Mundaun manages to be cinematic all the while feeling like the clunky little indie game it is, is kind of astounding. It's testament to how much you can achieve with the right atmosphere created through unique visuals, wonderful sound design and a setting that, even though it's minimalistic, brings to life a very eerie place. The mountain village is a character in itself and the (almost lost) language it's inhabitants speak, give it a dreamlike context. Mundaun is capable of scaring you more than once, not only through occasional jumpscares, but also through moments of solitude and silence. I cannot stress enough how much I loved this game and how masterfully it's built.

Usually when I talk to others who have played this game, we come to the conclusion that it's "an adventure game with horror in it" and that horror is typically a deep sense of dread. That dread is well written in to the story of the game, in which I feared for the town, the people and myself while uncovering the mysteries within Mundaun. I could always feel like worse and worse things would happen in this world, and that there could not be a resolution.

The art style is the immediate selling point of this game, although everything else about it is fantastic. I thought the black-and-white / sepia tones would be boring or ugly to look at for hours, but it is both unique and has been beautifully used throughout lands. There is a distinction between regions you enter and the skybox is typically always visible and gorgeous.

Beyond the artistic choice, what gives this game outstanding visual style is how that the way the player is drawn to environmental scripted moments. There are things that happen throughout the game that you could miss if you weren't watching, and I almost did, but there is a particular way these moments pop out of the background, or the players focus gets pulled to them. I don't know how to explain it, but when these moments happen it is startling and mesmerizing!

Mechanically, the game is a simple adventure, with an appropriate amount of verbs and interactions the player can make. It leans minimally on a survival-horror genre, with limited supplies to use against enemies, but doesn't rely entirely on them. I ended up exploring as much as I could, not because of collecting but because I was craving more storytelling.

This game is also really fun! I enjoyed driving around, meeting new people and walking around the world. I'm not big into adventure game puzzles as I can find them either too easy and boring or too difficult and frustrating. Mundaun found a happy-medium, where every next objective was explained when necessary. If I found something I could interact with and didn't understand, I would eventually be told how I could use it when needed. I didn't end up backtracking a lot to figure out if I forgot or missed something, it wasn't much and did not feel like a chore, as the vehicle is fun, the land is nice to look at, and the creepiness of some environments is pleasant to pass through.

Mundaun is a wonderful game, and after beating it, wanted to revisit for another possible ending - or just to be in this world again, find the secrets I may have missed and be amazed by the visual moments I may have forgotten about. I can't recommend this game enough.

sates my hunger for more first-person adventure games rly nicely, before even all the obvious aesthetic draw. feels authentically folkloric and fableistic in its narrative structure, somehow up to and including the multiple endings, which all feel like plausible outcomes to a story mutated by oral tradition...makes me think a lot ab how much i love horror's central Thing of making u realize the world is More Then What U Thought It Was, ab grappling w/ the impossible, ab questioning the bedrock of "normal" reality, whats shaped it, whats going on behind the curtain. maybe not an all-timer but a rly nice little bundle of basically everything i could want from this type of thing...except perhaps pronounced emotional connection, but perhaps thats the price paid sometimes for the somewhat Distancing effect of fables. whats meant 2 provoke u is not any traditional narrative Thing, but the story residing in yr internal world later, ready for u to remember it the next time u see a big spooky stack of hay

i love a game with a strong sense of geography, culture and history; a bit of a gameplay balance between friction and stark simplicity; and a compelling art style (in this case, one so befitting that it makes you ask what came first, "the story or the art?" because they're so symbiotic).

it's fitting this was the second last game I played of 2021 (last one before my PS5 and 'NeXt GeN gaming' arrived) because it sort of represents a culmination of every game philosophy I came to admire across the year. like if i could take every game I loved in 2021 and shove them into a ball of meat for lunch, it'd basically just be Mundaun.

An excellent little adventure game, light on gameplay systems but with enough there to keep you engaged. All of the little interactions with the world add enough flavour to entertain, and further justify its existence as a game rather than in a more passive storytelling medium. Driving the Muvel is a particular highlight. There isn't much to it, but finally getting the keys and cruising around the mountainside in that thing was an enjoyable time.

Unfortunately, enemies suck. It's nice that they're there, justifying several gameplay systems (player upgrades, the gun, pitchforks, several items) but it would have been nice if they were a bit easier to work around. Ultimately, I think it's good that they were included to avoid the game being a walking simulator or something in the vein of Outlast, but it would have been nicer for the execution to have been more engaging.

Mundaun is the devil in the corner.

When I was a small child, around ten years old, my school had a German Language Studies camp. During the winter, kids who applied would spend one week at a resort in the Alps. It was as idyllic as one's childhood memories could be. The winding roads took you up to a sole building at the mountaintop. I was in a room with my closest friends. My crush was on the same floor. Everything set for rambunctious child activities. Yet when the night has truly fallen, none of us would leave our rooms. We'd be too afraid to even look outside of the window. The wind would lay an incessant siege on our building. Dark forms would look down on us from the peaks. It was a nightmare.

The game's start unearthed all those memories. Opening up with a bus ride to your beloved grandfather's town. Those winding mountain roads are something else man. At the end of the line, you will find yourself in a few scattered buildings. So few residents still live there that you can count them on your hand. Whatever bureaucrat named this a town sure had a sense of humor. The old buildings carry history with them, marks of the war still scattered around. The devil has slept in every corner. The horrors of mundaun are not a desecration of it's idyll. It fits right in, almost as if they were part of it since its conception. That's because technically AND figuratively, it has been.

Immediately, a strong impression made by the sepia toned, "hand drawn" look of the game. Textures are monochromatic, painted beige by the camera filter. Faces and models look rough. The low poly meshes twist into different shapes during horror segments. These graphics are exciting! I'd say it's worth checking this game out just to see something new done with 3D.

The combat is a puzzle. Your enemies are blind to fire, so you can lure them straight into burning hay. You can charge at them with a pitchfork that breaks after a few stabs. It's stiff as hell. Sneaking is always an option. They will shriek when they see you.

The environments are fairly open. There is a linear progression to the maps, but the space is big enough to warrant having a cute truck for you to drive. To inspire you for exploration, a lot of spaces carry optional upgrades. Your three stats are health, sanity, or marksmanship. This latter stat is somewhat puzzling, only coming into play in the last hour of the game. You aren't strictly required to gather all of these, but they do make the game easier. It can be hard to sneak by enemies undetected, and you can't take on multiple enemies at once.

Should you play this? The game uses it's five to six hour runtime excellently. Mechanics are simple, but they are used in clever ways to provide you with new situations. You can pet the goats. It's fresh.

This game is unique if nothing else, for films I could draw comparisons to Midsommar or The Witch but for games this stands pretty much alone and is worth to try just for that. The visual style isn't always the prettiest, the pencil-drawn textures aren't the exciting feature that they were made out to be, but wow can this game look absolutely stunning in certain environments, making these all the more rewarding. The gameplay features some unique twists that you wouldn't expect going into this game for the first time, but ultimately it is the fantastic atmosphere, absolutely beautiful and haunting score and sound design and firm grasp on unsettling imagery and careful tuning of the horror-screws that shine bright in this game.

I ran into a glitch where I had to hold the w key for 30+ minutes to get a hay stacking vehicle to move an inch every 2 minutes. Most games, this would be a dropping off point, but I stuck through it with this one because of how engrossed I was in this creepy, corrupted version of real life Swiss municipality, Mundaun.

This is one of those games where you can talk about this game on a deeper level with pals, but in the moment of playing you're scared as shit that you're gonna die from a bee attack.

The kinda game you sink right into. I absolutely loved it.

There's something meditative about it. You don't feel rushed, or like you're plodding around aimlessly. You can pretty much explore this Swiss village at your leisure. Soaking in the wee cultural touches you've never seen before. Picking up clues to what's happening here and there.

Such a unique look with all hand drawn textures, and that off-white colour palette. Everybody speaking beautiful Romansh. Unsettling imagery paced just right. Man, this would have absolutely been my Backloggd 2021 GOTY if I'd played it last year.

Ah yes, that parallel reality in which European arthouse director Ingmar Bergman makes a Silent Hill game. Actually, Mundaun feels very much that.
When your protagonist, Curdin, arrives at the eerie, titular town on the mountain, to investigate the death of his grandfather, the strange, Swiss townsfolk indicate an evil force pulling the strings.
As expected, the game’s signature hand-drawn design does wonders for its rural, textural environment, doused with an olde sepia tone to transport the player to a time and a place that only once was. As a result, the jagged animations of the doodled character models give them a superbly uncanny quality reminiscent of old PS2 games (always a plus).
But Mundaun’s strengths go far beyond aesthetics, vital as they may be. The horror-adventure gameplay is exploration-heavy as you solve puzzles and unlock doors to new areas in town, not mention making yourself coffees, collecting hay in a truck and even sledding. The bizarre puzzles - including locating an area through the shadow of the church or hitting slabs of meat in a certain order - are delightful, albeit dismissed by some people as ‘obtuse’ - they’ve probably never played a Siren game in their life! Moreover, the combat is appropriately clunky as you fend off some creepy monstrous foes with a pitchfork and a rifle, and it often makes more sense to run away.
These enemy encounters are undoubtably the most traditionally ‘scary’ moments. Elsewhere, the game focuses on building a sense of dread and unease as you delve further into the sinister goings on, much more akin to the subdued, quiet horror of films like Hour of the Wolf or The Wicker Man than, say, The Lighthouse.
Whilst there are pacing issues, notably due to the nature of uncovering the mystery without any immediate sense of a deadline, the world design and exploration gameplay are enough to rope the player in with every play session, making for an experience that is never truly boring.
The “obtuse” puzzles and gameplay might divide some, but there’s still so much to love in the game’s rich atmosphere and storytelling over a beautiful soundtrack. Simultaneously old-school and refreshing, Mundaun sets a bar that all indie horror titles should strive for.

Mundaun’s first-person horror threats are recurring, and increase in number as the game progresses, and yet it retains the feeling of a walking sim. I mean this in the positive sense of environmental specificity, of wandering a landscape saturated in a history that precedes us, and which reveals itself in small, partial ways as we traverse it. I also mean it in the sense of an environmental intimacy. There is a second-hand nostalgia given to us by our virtual body (Curdin), who is prone to personal reminiscences as we uncover Mundaun’s mysteries together in real-time. This is to say the game conditions us to experience its landscape as both alien and profoundly intimate, and it is the intimacy that is most charged with folk-horrific dread. For the player who frequently feels as though there is a strange force watching them from within the world of the walking sim, Mundaun’s dread is most welcoming.

By capturing us in reminiscence and providing us with real-time tangible threats, Mundaun makes pronounced the strange negotiations of gamic tense. When I feel as though this is a walking sim, I consider my efforts oriented to the recovery of some past hidden in the landscape; when I feel as though it is survival horror I am attuned to the anxiety of the instant. This is not in itself novel — any game with attention to its world balances the time before us (past) with the time of action (now) — but Mundaun amplifies this tension through the strength of its environmental intimacy and the beckoning of its reminiscence within the horror format. That is its narrative, like its enemies, unfolds in real-time. Curdin has returned to his grandfather’s village for his funeral, and this return precipitates the series of events that is Mundaun. We talk to its inhabitants, run errands, solve puzzles, our actions all assisting in the progression of a narrative that has not yet occurred. And yet because of the game’s mood, the narrative still to come seems always already lost in the past. Who are these people? Are they still alive? Who attends Jeremias’ (the priest’s) sermons? H.R., the talking corpse in the snow? Walther, deep in his forgotten wartime bunker? The spectral Flurina? Playing Mundaun is wandering a buried village, its inhabitants trapped and reenacting the ghost story that binds them to this beautiful, tragic mountain village. In the end they asked me to return, but in the light of day I saw it for what it was. It’s over, I thought, forever now.

In terms of how it plays with or without this doomed mood, Mundaun’s enemies are consistent with its local geography, staggering through the hills. The hay creatures are frightening because they look like the haystacks we keep passing, and because their idiot-physicality gives them a sense of random, thoughtless weight more dreadful than a human-like intelligence. The beekeepers on the other hand hover — something I didn’t realise until I got too close, and which promptly brought to mind the haunting image of the Blair Witch “whose feet never touched the ground”. Both in their own way make our adoptive body in Curdin feel particularly leaden, and ill-equipped to respond to the world and its demands. He becomes the little boy, gazing terrified out the window of his grandfather’s house, believing all at once his superstitions. Mundaun’s puzzles carve a linear path through the world, providing us tasks to advance the day so that narrative time can proceed. Most impressive is the way that, as the story comes together and its emotions are made to resonate, the developers maintain the same patience that welcomed us in. It becomes ‘big’ but it is never loud, scripted sequences takes over but it still pretends it’s off-kilter, about to fall apart. It’s so good that it never wants you to know quite how good it is.

There's something to be said that I can't quite figure out yet about the way we are 'cursed' on arrival. It is only when the Old Man grabs us, deforming our arm, that Mundaun opens itself to us. I've tried to put into words elsewhere how a similar maiming of the arm takes place in Resident Evil 7 — we are 'welcome(d) to the family' only after our arm is cut off and reattached, making us kin to the Baker family. Despite their significant differences (both as texts and in their treatment of the arm), Mundaun is similarly interested in the notion of homecoming as a kind of physical maiming. The simple pathos of this sets in when, departing on the bus, our business concluded in our grandfather's ghost village, we look down to see our arm still deformed. Perhaps this is the cost of 'being there' in the world of the game, our physical bodies conjoined with Curdin's, Curdin's with Mundaun. Or perhaps more generally it's the cost of reminiscence, memory being the wound that cannot heal.

The horror is at times quite vivid when the game is in its storytelling mode, but the gameplay is never suitably tense and is, in my opinion, always slower and less eventful than it should be. But, then again, had things been faster paced (in a horror/tension kind of way) and more eventful, the stealth, action, and combat would likely just drag this game down even further than it already does. What is for certain is that the art is, usually, pretty wonderful and I appreciate the Swiss setting and culture as intriguing and unique to horror videogames. I just wish the game was more tightly designed around its horror gameplay rather than the art and plot. Made it about 3/4 the way through, by the looks of things, and decided not to go on when I am pretty sure I encountered a gamebreaking inventory glitch after a crash. This was a horror title I was pretty excited for, so I am above all disappointed.

One of the most unique looking games I've played.

There's this weight on your shoulders the entire playthrough that doesn't go away. Mundaun does a great job of maintaining that unsettling feeling through it's one of a kind pencil drawn artstyle and great sound design.

The actual gameplay and narrative didn't quite grab me enough though, I'd say. I felt like I was often lost in these massive environments and unsure where to go in order to progress.

Loved the vibes but not the game.

I like a lot of things about Mundaun. Unease permeates most of the journey, only fading away at times when the pastoral beauty simply becomes overwhelming through picturesque views of the mountainside parish. The Swiss folk horror storytelling mixed with good ol' creepy Catholicism and light touches of antique tech gives the game such distinct character, blurring the familiar with the unfamiliar to heighten the feeling of things being a bit off-kilter.

There's a quiet confidence to the slow pacing that I admire. The game lets you explore open environments at your own leisure without worrying about you triggering progress to hit the next plot beat. Curiosity is rewarded with scraps of worldbuilding, items to help you on your quest, or arresting vistas of the mystic alps. It never feels like a waste of time to get off the beaten path.

When you are on the critical path, you find yourself somnambulating through hazy daydreams of hay demons and paper vessels slicing sea and sky, ponderously navigating chiaroscuro nightmares of talking severed goat heads and dark figures casting ominous shadows, and spiraling into vignetted memories of foregone duty and pacts undone in claustrophobic tunnels and caverns as you stare into pictures that stir the past. Oh, and you do simple horror adventure game puzzles like play musical notes on hooked carcasses so that a key oozes out of a hanged man's mouth.

You drive a hay baling truck sometimes. You can tune its radio to any of the stations that play different flavors of traditional church music, operatic ballads, and local talk radio in Romansh, then leave it playing as you wander off. You can also turn on the headlights to serve as a beacon at night. But you can't leave the engine running. You have to turn the key every time you get in to start moving your beloved Muvel. It can go surprisingly fast, but its handling cannot handle any surface outside clearly marked roads at a speed any faster than a crawl. You have to drive it deliberately, somewhat like a normal person in a normal world would, or you risk careening off winding tracks and barreling down steep slopes. It can feel a wee bit silly.

That deliberateness and silliness extend to the rest of the mechanics, in a way that's charming and effective at times and immersion-breaking at others.

When I had to make coffee by filling a pan with water by the fountain a stone's throw away from grandpa's house, returning home to put it on top of a stove, pouring coffee beans into the water-filled pan, placing a log in a compartment and lighting it on fire, waiting to let the coffee boil, then using a cup to collect the coffee, I found the process to be a soothing little ritual.

When I had to weakly poke at lumbering enemies with a pitchfork that broke off one prong with every hit, rendering it useless after three strikes, resulting in two consecutive game over screens for me, I found myself cursing at the intrusion of combat and hard failure states once more. Never have I so quickly turned down the difficulty setting of a video game to easy.

The explicitly game-y stat upgrades and on-screen text like saying you did "bonus damage" for a successful sneak attack feel so out of place and took me out of the reverie whenever I had to contend with them. They're jarring compromises to facilitate survival horror elements that don't add anything to the experience. I don't need the game to be a straight-up, conflict-free, linear walking sim, but the puzzle-solving and exploration were totally enough to keep me engaged on a mechanical level. The tension in the narrative and presentation was all the tension i needed.

While I can't say I was emotionally engrossed in the story and that it was fairly easy to grok the broad strokes, the odd imagery in its set sequences and the small tricks it pulls made for a captivating time. I wanted to see what weird thing it would show me next, and I was satisfied with the ending that fit the genre.

Aside from a couple of minor complaints about the mechanics, I enjoyed Mundaun, with the pencil-drawn visual style, the unsettling mood, and the strange sights as the obvious highlights.

Everything about Mundaun felt oppressive, the greyscale imagery disturbing but also having a certain beauty to it. I just had to explore every corner while navigating the various puzzles and monsters. Even the simple things—making coffee—held my attention and reminded me that optional activities can feel the most satisfying. One thing’s for sure, it embraced its cultural roots, with voice acting in Romansh, Switzerland’s fourth national language—this did wonders for immersion. Unfortunately, I absolutely detested the fear mechanic that affected movement when near an enemy as it negatively impacted stealth and the already janky combat.

One of the more noteworthy indie horror titles out there, but it was definitely rough around the edges, especially in relation to its enemies and the gameplay surrounding them.

Mundaun's masterfully crafted atmosphere sets the perfect tone for its horror story, which has you investigating the sudden death of your grandfather in a provincial Italian village during the 1920's after being visited by someone you can only assume is the Devil himself.

The visuals are oddly reminiscent of a painting - its sepia tones and washed out textures are gorgeously realized. The best way I could describe Mundaun's overall tone is "The Seventh Seal if it were a videogame".

While the game excels in the story and setting department, it falls a bit flat on the gameplay. The diegetic inventory, diary and interactive systems (such as boiling coffee, turning individual parts of your hay cart on and off etc) are a welcome change of pace, but they're excessively janky and could use a little more variety - especially regarding enemies and combat. It starts to really get repetitive during its latter half.

I enjoyed Mundaun, but compared to the essays that I seem to oh so love churning out for most games I play, it didn't leave me with much to say. This isn't an issue, I think it's good, just simple.

It's more neat than anything else, and as demeaning as that may sound I think that's my takeaway from Mundaun. It's fun, it looks cool, it portrays a unique setting, it has a decent story, nothing that blows my socks off in any specific category (except for the visuals, those are amazing) but all of it is pretty neat. And honestly, that's good enough sometimes. The little details, those are good too. How you have to brew your own coffee step by step, the janky lil truck that you can drive around, the weird shape that your lantern's light casts on everything, the journal that's all hand-drawn by the protagonist and features his sketches of basically every event, it's good stuff. It's neat.

I guess I feel compelled to mention the issues I had, combat is jank especially if you don't up your fear resistance, but luckily there isn't much of it. It's weirdly demanding on the hardware, forcing me to crank both visual settings and resolution down just to run it at a slightly shakey 30 FPS (my laptop isn't a monster but it struggles more with this than AAA games, which is pretty weird). The biggest issue is that there's like six endings and I don't really feel that fits this completely linear experience, especially since the one I got was kinda lame (dunno about the others). Kind of an anticlimactic ending especially given that the endgame was pretty long.