Typified by its asymmetrically surrealist larger than life character and world designs which proudly embrace influences from such artistic trailblazers as Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, it’s probably fair to say that ever since Rock of Ages tumbled into my lap on the good ol’ PlayStation 3 back in 2011, I’ve been something of an avowed fan of Chilean developer ACE Team. From Rock of Ages and the Zeno Clash games through to The Eternal Cylinder, ACE Team have been responsible for some of the most intriguing and downright bizarre video games to release across the last couple of decades. Ironically, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is probably ACE Team at its most conventional as it tackles the increasingly shop-worn first-person extraction shooter template and yet manages to deliver something truly fresh that the Chilean studio should be rightfully applauded for, jank be damned.
The Mound: Omen Of Cthulhu PS5 Review
Taking place in 1652, during the era of the Conquistadors, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu centers in on four different vagabond explorers that, for one reason or another, find themselves exiled from Spanish society and so decide to test their fortune (and mortality) by hunting for long lost treasures in the Valdivian Forests of Chile. Straight away, the setting of The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu with its overgrown jungles, dark forests, abandoned forts, foreboding caverns and creepy temples is one that captivates when taken in the context of its extraction shooter/slasher genre leanings, not least because each location provides not only slathers on the atmospherics, but also provides ample possibilities for your myriad foes to conceal themselves, but more on that in a bit.
Before you get stuck into the depths of the Valdivian Forests and beyond, Omen of Cthulhu introduces players to the Tempestad, the seventeenth century galleon responsible for shuttling you around the Valdivian peninsula. More than that, the Tempestad also doubles up as a hub, allowing you to choose your character at the start from the previously mentioned quartet of explorers, talk to other crew members, purchase items and plan your next expedition. Speaking of characters, it’s worth noting that The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu takes a leaf from the book of Valve’s Left 4 Dead, which is to say that the differences between each playable protagonist are cosmetic only and there are no class or role-based mechanics at play here.
Before you hop out on an expedition for plunder and glory, you are required to sign a contract which stipulates a minimum amount of loot you need to collect and also the number of times you can retry before forfeiting that contract and moving onto the next. Perhaps most importantly, each contract provides you with a preset of weapons and tools (such as oil lamps, torches and things of that nature) which you can take with you, rather than being able to completely choose exactly what gear you want for a given expedition, which if I’m being honest, feels a little odd to not to empower the player to choose their own loadout, but hey-ho.
Once you’ve equipped your gear and you hop onto the row boat which takes you to your expedition, it’s pretty much off to the races and it’s here where Omen of Cthulhu really begins to reveal what makes it so compelling. It’s also worth mentioning that expeditions are split between main story ‘missions’ which require you to discover key relics and items which draw you closer to the titular mound which acts as the gateway to the mysterious cosmic city of K’n-yan.
At a high level, the gameplay loop which defines each expedition runs something like this – you rock up at a place, you have an ox and cart that follows you about, you murder things with either melee or ranged weapons, collect treasures, supplies and food, and then hoof it back to the rowboat to bring your riches back to the Tempestad. The more goods and loot you bring back, the more XP you gain, which can in turn result in gaining levels that offer up tokens to buy items to use on your next expedition, and permanent upgrades such as additional inventory space. Of course however, the Cthulhu is in the details.
The most immediate thing you’ll notice is that early on, you have just six inventory spaces, which also includes the spaces you’ll need for weapons, tools and supplies. The upshot of this then, somewhat predictably, is that you’ll spend a lot of time going back and forth from the mobile ox cart onto which you can load your precious loot. Additionally, while the cart can reach most areas of a given expedition, it can only travel along paths that are wide enough to accommodate it, so if you end up venturing into the guts of some hidden cove that happens to lay way off the beaten trail, you shouldn’t count on the ox cart being there when you leave. Luckily, salvation comes in the form of a handy horn which when blown into, summons the ox cart to as close to your location as possible, and it’ll be something that’ll be used frequently and often for reasons that will become shortly obvious.
Of course, this being a game about, well, Cthulhu Things, the concept of madness is one that exists as much more than just superficial dressing and instead plays a prominent role, both narratively and mechanically. When people refer to the setting as a character within a game or a movie, it tends to be something of a slightly abstract analogue, in Omen of Cthulhu though, the forest is absolutely an enemy you’ll need to contend with. You see, the forest itself can come alive the further you venture into it and longer you spend in the clutches of its various fauna and flora, and when it leaves its ‘dormant’ state, can become outright aggressive, with trees that can attack you with whipping branches and so much more besides.
In addition to a potentially aggressive forest, Omen of Cthulhu doubles down on the madness that is so intrinsic to the Cthulhu setting and it’s here that ACE Team’s latest effort arguably does its best work. When your character finds themselves in throes of madness in Omen of Cthulhu, it can manifest itself in a wide variety of ways. Treasure chests when opened can sometimes be a pile of fly-ridden corpses, trees can seemingly uproot and chase after you, the world can be painted in blood, friendly characters can disappear before your eyes, your character can vomit up poisonous centipedes that attack you and your party and so much more besides.
But where this madness mechanic really comes into its own is how it’s leveraged in the online multiplayer mode. Allow me to preface this part of the review by clearly stating that The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is downright terrifying when played using a 3D wireless headset as every single movement in the brush, crack of a branch and call of decent creatures feel magnified in ways that a flat audio experience could never really replicate. Being the sadistic lot that they are, ACE Team make the most of Omen of Cthulhu’s heady audio caliber by augmenting it with spatialised voice chat which allows you to hear the chatter of your real-life human compadres whether at different volumes depending on their distance to you. The thing is, when the madness kicks in, Omen of Cthulhu can weaponise this technology against you, making you hear voices that aren’t there and unleashing a cacophony of audio nightmares upon you that can be deeply unsettling.
As a direct result this madness system makes Omen of Cthulhu’s take on the extraction shooter genre feel extremely fresh and compelling. There’s nothing quite like stalking through the depths of the Peruvian jungle while a cosmic horror uses your senses against you. A by-the-numbers extract shooter, Omen of Cthulhu is not. All that said however, it’s also true that ACE Team’s latest offering is quite rough around its figurative edges and one particular area where Omen of Cthulhu lets itself down somewhat is in the combat side of things.
First, the good things about the combat in Omen of Cthulhu. There is an element of innate strategy involved here. Because the firearms are of a seventeenth century vintage, it takes ages to reload them and so you must take this into account when picking your shots. Equally, enemies can be assassinated from behind and can be outright dismembered during combat if struck in the right places hard enough. Where the combat falls down however, is that it just doesn’t feel very good as attacks seem to phase through enemies, the firearms feel and sound weak, and there just generally seems to be a lack of satisfying impact when you start dishing out the violence.
Another aspect of its design where Omen of Cthulhu doesn’t exactly cover itself in glory is in the friendly AI. If you do decide to play solo (and I honestly wouldn’t recommend it as this is a game which is absolutely calibrated for an online multiplayer experience) you’ll be assigned a friendly AI explorer after an initial mission who will try and follow you about and take on enemies. The key word there is ‘try’, because more often than not the AI gets stuck on rocks, fails to see enemies right in front of him and is generally a useless clod that adds nothing to the overall experience.
Finally, there’s also a level of jank to be contended with which permeates throughout Omen of Cthulhu. Whether it’s enemies getting stuck in scenery, clipping through objects, getting stuck in certain places in the game world or just presentation issues where, for some reason, the world map has teeny-tiny text for the various places you can visit and only enlarges when you magnify upon it, it’s clear that Omen of Cthulhu could have probably benefitted from a couple more months of polish.
It certainly helps that I have a relatively high tolerance for jank – so long as the underlying concept is executed well – and ultimately, I feel that is precisely the case with The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. Indeed, Omen of Cthulhu’s closest analogue in the extraction shooter genre is probably Crytek’s excellent Hunt: Showdown 1886, though Omen of Cthulhu somewhat lacks the satisfying precision gunplay and visual finesse of that game, it nonetheless strikes out confidently on its own thanks to the employ of its innovative madness mechanics.
I suspect that despite its strides toward something a little more conventional, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu will still be something of an acquired taste for some, much like a great deal of ACE Team’s back catalogue arguably has been. Sure enough it has a heap of jank and the combat isn’t as satisfying as it should be, but The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu still represents the sort of resoundingly refreshing take on the extraction shooter that the genre continues to demand thanks to its brilliant use of madness mechanics that deftly elevate its online multiplayer experience.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.