We’ve been fascinated by the look of Hidden Fields’s Mundaun ever since the folk-horror game was announced 8 months ago, sporting a pencil-sketched aesthetic, a lot of very moody villagers, and a whole host of scarecrow monsters that don’t look any less terrifying for being made of straw. Now that the game’s finally out, we’ve been excited to dig into its take on Seventh Seal-y misery, even if we’re not as wild about the potential to be taken apart by bees like that poor dope in the game’s trailer.
To celebrate the release, we’re going to be playing through the opening hour or so of Mundaun on our weekly Twitch stream today, seeing how far we can get before the deadly Scarecrow-Bee Consortium comes for us. You can check out the stream over at twitch.tv/AVClubTwitch; we’ll be going live at 2 p.m. Central today.
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This is the sort of game, outside of reading/watching a review, that I’m going to avoid footage of. This looks like my kind of a nightmare game, and hopefully it’ll scratch my itch for a horror.
1) Hats off to dude who made it. The hand drawn art and story is awesome.
2) Fuck that guy and his game to hell. Too damn scary. Had to play that shit with all the lights on, gamma set as high as possible and sound on low. I never want to see another goat in my life.
I feel you. I got by, but only so. And I was constantly surprised to see how the game managed to give me cold chills down my back all the way through, right to the end, even though it only has, like, 4 different kinds of encounters.
Making coffee has never been more terrifying.
Hence, the Italian coffee maker mentioned in my other post. The frying pan would leave you terribly vunerable in real life. Whereas something about that unscrewing of the parts of the Italien coffee maker (prayer wheel-ish in its nature), or the bubbling sound the water makes as it rises, is so terribly soothing, even creatures from hell can’t unsettle you all the way through. Those real-life mountain dwellers are canny when it comes to repelling the uncanny, I tell you. (That, or maybe the coffee tastes just way better made that way.)
Let me be frank: I can’t be objective. I mean, its both literally and figuratively very close to how and where I grew up. (Basically, replace the goats with cows, the hayloader with a Steyr-Puch Haflinger and the coffee powder poured directly into boiling water with an italian coffee maker — we were rustic, but not barbarians — and you have a pretty accurate picture of how I have spend a good many week-ends in my childhood. Well, minus the occult occurences — at least the all-too-obvious ones. That three-tone sound the bus makes in the opening scene? That shit sounds like home.)
All that said, I really was surprised to see just how… well, good the game is. I expected dense atmosphere and a truly unique aesthetic style, and it delivers on those fronts. And yeah, of course, there’s that rare pleasure of being in the in-group just by sharing a geographic and cultural origin with it. But I really thought that it would be a bit concept art-ish. You know, the kind of game that has maybe one good idea and great visuals, but then stretches that too thin, or forgets that it should be engaging all the way through? Not that uncommon in the indie space, that. Mundaun is not that. It’s sometimes a bit clunky, ramshakle, in the indie kind of way, of course. But it’s also a really, really well-made game in basically every way that counts. I mean, it’s honest-to-god a candidate for the best-paced adventure game I have ever played. And it’s varied in a way that a lot of games that spend this game’s whole development cost on Friday Crunch Pizza are not. Also, eerie as all fuck.
In other words, I really, really liked it. Didn’t have to squint or overlook anything, just because “I know that stuff, so I’m in an eternally forgiving mood”. Not much to forgive. But a lot to enjoy and wonder at.
is this a Freddy Krueger origin story? im down!