Review: Mundaun Comes Alive Primarily Through Its Engrossing Sense of Place

At a glance, the most distinctive quality to Mundaun is its black-and-white art. The hand-penciled textures lend a haunting gravitas to the inherent imperfections of this Swiss horror game’s lo-fi style, from the jagged and foreboding environments to the people who move like jerky marionettes. Whenever you pass over paintings or other important objects, the camera starts to zoom in, casting a bleary, swimmy haze over the world.

Mundaun’s greatest achievement, though, may be its setting, a settlement in the Swiss Alps that’s brought to life with tangible vigor by the developers at Hidden Fields. As a young man named Curdin, you return home after receiving news of your grandfather’s death in a barn fire, despite the local priest’s odd insistence that there’s no need for you to attend the burial. His reason for keeping you away immediately becomes clear—in strange weather patterns, paintings capable of changing the world, and humanoid monsters draped in hay. At the center of it all is a creepy old man with a blackened visage who deforms Curdin’s left hand.

Mundaun’s world is populated with the eccentric locks and hidden keys that are familiar from so many horror games, but it stands apart from its cheaper fellows with its focus on unassuming details and everyday processes. The primary method of transport here, for one, is an old hay baler that requires you, once you’re seated in it, to look around the dashboard for the things you can interact with: the ignition key to turn, the button that lets you turn on the headlights, and the dial that lets you fiddle with the radio as you drive. And the tools at your disposal are rarely more complex than an easily splintered pitchfork, the pair of binoculars hanging around your neck, and whatever fits into your conspicuously large backpack.

You can even brew coffee, and it’s a bit of a process, given that you have to fill a pot with water at an outside pump, put it on an old stove, dump the coffee in, shove a block of wood into the stove, light a fire, and wait until it’s ready to pour into a cup from your backpack. But there’s also a more practical application to the coffee-making, as it functions as a kind of upgrade to steel Curdin’s nerves, which are worked raw from the unnatural entities that roam the mountains. Whenever a monster sights you, it begins a ranged attack and paralyzes you with fear, slowing your movements so that it’s as difficult to flee as it is to close the distance for a well-placed pitchfork jab. But your fear will become less debilitating with each cup of coffee.

Mundaun’s combat system largely works the way that it’s supposed to, in that its clunky and, as such, unsatisfying qualities discourage you from seeking out a fight. You’re usually better off sneaking around or lighting patches of hay aflame, hoping the fire leaps to one of the monsters. But the game goes a little too far in letting you largely avoid combat, in the process sapping your exploration of much dreadful anticipation, as threats are easily spotted from a distance even within your monochromatic field of vision—and, for good feature, Curdin’s cursed hand begins to writhe and glow whenever monsters target him.

Throughout, you’re engaging or avoiding monsters predominantly on your own terms rather than being forced to adapt to unexpected threats. And because you always know how and when to react, and you’re never really worried about wasting resources you might need later on, the game wants for a messier sense of uncertainty. Only in its traversal does Mundaun break from this rigidity, as you have multiple angles of approach when, say, it comes to going down the region’s mountainous landscape, as well as multiple ways to first acquire an important item.

Mundaun ends up more moody and strange than outright unsettling, particularly since its horrible sights come perilously close to someone’s idea of a joke for why the setting would be decidedly not scary, only capable of supplying things like evil beekeepers, walking hay, and a spooky cabin on a chairlift. But the power of the game’s art and atmosphere draw you in regardless, creating a sense of eerie wrongness that’s much creepier than any of the physical creatures you’re meant to fear. If Mundaun doesn’t totally work as a traditional horror game, it nevertheless proves that a vivid sense of place can be the most engrossing thing of all.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.