Last friday I finished my playthrough of Mundaun, the pencil-drawn horror videogame set on the Canton of the Grisons (the most eastern part of the Swiss Alps).
The folk horror subgenre is sadly unappreciated when it comes to videogames, and that’s a pity because it’s a flavor that can lead to very distinct and unique experiences if properly executed. Well, it makes me happy to say that Mundaun successfully manages to off-set that downward trend.
I had the greatest of times with this game. As a fan of both horror and extremely idiosyncratic weird ass games, Mundaun is truly a treat. I don’t know what I was expecting when I got into it, I guess a walking sim with a good atmosphere and, hopefully, a couple of interesting visual ideas, perhaps. What I wasn’t certainly anticipating was a crossover between Bethesda’s Dark Corners of the Earth and Stardew Valley. But establishing any comparison is a bit tricky with this one because what has really captivated me is how unlike anything else it is when it comes to pacing, tone and general mechanical design. This is a game in which you’ll jump from harvesting the hay crops from your grandpa’s farm using his old truck to solving the mystery of the dark figure that has been haunting the region for the last 50 years. At some point, you’ll even start having full conversations with the items that you have accumulated on your inventory. It’s a delightful intersection between survival horror (with resource and inventory management), classic adventure and modern narrative driven game.
The eclectic nature of the game comes at the cost of making all the different mechanical elements a bit undercooked and underdeveloped. This is a game of many ideas which are thrown to the player at a fast pace and which manage to constantly surprise, but they don’t have the depth you would find in a more focused game that develops them and tries to add nuance and layers over the course of the playthrough. So yeah, it is perhaps a bit too lightweight in that regard, but imo it works because of the setting, the narrative pacing and the fact that all those ideas and systems are brought up in the context of a story that introduces them when they become pertinent, then discard them when they have run its course. And in the end, I honestly don’t think anyone would approach a game such as this one expecting accurate harvesting mechanics or deep melee combat systems. For most people, as it happened to me, it’s actually going to be the other way around: you’d play this expecting and interesting art direction and a couple of neat stylistic choices, which it delivers in abundance, so everything else ends up feeling as a nice bonus.
If nothing else, there are not many games where you’ll get to listen to a full Romansch voiceover, the fourth national Swiss language, spoken by less than 20k people, only in the region in which the game takes place. So yeah, despite those minor caveats this one managed to stand out.
@yeso take a look at this, I think you’ll like it.