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.
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.