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.

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.

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.

I actually don't know why I liked it as much as I did. My guess is because this game feels like a slow melancholic autumn-y drive through pretty county side.

I came to like the overall environment vibe with more houses than there are people, the need to go and fetch some water to make coffee, the weird but surprisingly soothing voice acting and gently screaking doors.

For some reason developers decided to include gameplay features like stealth and critical attacks on unalarmed enemies, notification of which instantly drops you out of immersion but somehow making it more enjoyable in the long run. Maybe it has so little to do with the game that it comes out of another end.

The plot is a pretty simple story of your everyday boy coming back to the village to attend grandpa's funeral. Alas, as it usually happens in small rural villages, your grandpa was cursed and you have to resolve this conflict with evil powers. Considering no one of the characters is really bothered by crooked churches or talking goat heads, I guess this is just a normal Swiss day. And this chill presentation of anything that's happening here is what gets me.

One thing I'd like to change though. I'd like muvel to be a bit slower, so the player could see more of the scenery.

Forgot to mention, I think visual style plays a major role in this game. And it's good. Not marvelous or stunning, but pleasing and relaxing.

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.

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.

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.

Normal human errands, including, but not limited to: eating, making coffee, driving, petting wildlife, sledding, walking, hiking, playing meat as instruments, going to church, eldritch strawmen, dreaming, quenching the thirst of the talking head of a goat, using the toilet, burning your hand, unlocking doors with a small figure of your grandfather, shooting an old rifle, collecting hay, making a pact with the devil, getting impaled on an icicle, smoking a pipe, drawing, collecting honey, navigating an old bunker by using the sprites of dead soldiers, seeing reflections of ghosts in water, riding the bus, painting, drowning, being paralyzed with fear, getting stung by bees, drunken comrades, abominable snowmen, giving toilet paper to a man stranded in an outhouse, solving tactile puzzles, & staring at yourself in the mirror until your very own vessel of flesh becomes contorted beyond recognition you don't know yourself anymore your quest is all but finished do not let the dark take you listen to the bell of the headless goat follow the sound sign the pact do not sign the pact the soldiers are coming you must hide take shelter do not give up fire when ready, & sleeping!

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

Mundaun es todo lo que te ofrece cuando te lo venden: es hermoso, bucólico y terrorífico. Es una historia de suspense y terror psicológico que te atrapa desde el minuto uno. Con un arte preciosísimo de carboncillo que le aporta originalidad y protagonismo. La intriga hace que te metas profundamente en el juego y que quieras saber más y más a medida que avanzas. La BSO es magnífica y sabe encajar en cada escenario a la perfección.

El folklore suizo y su mitología también tienen presencia. Al principio puede parecer todo una locura sacada de la retorcida mente del creador, pero conforme avanzas, y si investigas un poco por tu cuenta, descubres que los miedos son «reales».

Mundaun es un juego con encanto e identidad propia, perfecto para pasar unas 6-7 horas de miedo e intriga en los Alpes.

Posdata: ¿Os he dicho que podéis acariciar cabritas?

Reseña completa en https://orgullogamers.com/analisis-de-mundaun/

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.