This one was a slow burner, but as it wrapped up I couldn't help but really enjoy the experience. It's got a great style and unique story. It has a small but memorable cast of characters. The monsters you face are certaintly out there. And you couldn't always tell where the story was going. It had some really cool and flashy moments.

Some of the puzzles are a little complex and hard to follow. And some of the bigger maps, it is easy to get lost in, or to totally miss useful items.

If you like horror games you should absolutely have this on your radar.

A fairly traditional horror experience in terms of objectives and gameplay. You've all been there: the door is locked, go find the right key, maybe find a lost letter with some tidbits of lore, make sure not to be spotted by the monster in the meantime.

But Mundaun still manages to stick out from the crowd by nailing 3 elements. First, it is grounded and based in the folklore and myths of rural Switzerland which makes the whole thing uniquely fresh and captivating.

Secondly, its visual style, consisting of entirely hand drawn textures paired with a vintage, sepia-toned filter makes everything much more dreamy and surreal.

Lastly, the sound design in this is great and you'll truly feel isolated on a mountain in a precise time and place. Oh, and every painting has a little story to tell. I won't say more.

Seriously, it's because of game like Mundaun, Iron Lung and No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, that I'm still on the lookout for modern entries in such an over-saturated genre.

bro its like really cool at first but near the end its just such a slog i basically wanted to die but maybe thats just me like them spooky games are like that once you're assimilated you just might not get scared as easily but this game yeah its good i recommend it its kinda goated honestly its like this folk ass horror game with finnish something made-up language kinda deal in some middle of nowhere village in europe which is a pretty cool setting ngl and then theres this whole pencil hand drawn fell this game has so yeah and them spookies are pretty good as i said or didnt honestly i dont really remember already but its gets more goofy than spooky at some point which is fine but as i said gets pretty boring near the end, good game though

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 wanted to like this a lot more than I did. I had seen recommendations from a lot of great curators, and it started out very strong with an enticing premise and gorgeous pencilled visuals dripping with atmosphere.

The thing that killed it for me was those hay enemies. They can shoot from miles away, their needles slow you down, it's easy to miss your attacks, and if two of them see you at the same time it's basically game over. The first encounter was manageable, but I just couldn't get past the group near the start of the second area. All the carefully crafted tension dissipated, leaving in its wake only pure frustration.

I can totally appreciate the use of clunky combat and threatening enemies in a horror game, but after 5 or 6 tries I gave up. Maybe I'll revisit it one day.

Best thing this game has going for it is extremely obvious: its style and art direction. It really is gorgeous, and has plenty more visual tricks up its sleeves than just the hand-drawn textures. Outside of that, it's basically a walking sim with light survival horror elements. Honestly, the combat did not do much for me, at least until one sequence towards the climax. Melee in particular felt super unresponsive, and it was always difficult to tell if an attack was actually going to hit or not. Regardless, this one's worth a look almost for the style alone. Story's quite good, too. Just drop the encounter difficulty to easy and it'll remove a lot of tedium.

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.

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.

It began very slow but after i got introduced with characters and cozy feel of the village, language, dialogs, they all impacted me in the same vein with the Northern Journey. Storytelling was much like a directed movie, visuals and tone of the game was very surreal and relaxing. Mundaun's main issue for me is performance related, there were many unpleasant stutters, and clunk related to jump button being disfunctional, terrain being bumpy while exploring. Grandpa's rifle sounds spot on though.. Overall, Mundaun was an unforgettable experience for me. I blindly recommend this indie title and, if you like to step up the gears go with Northern Journey which came out same year as this.

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.

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.