The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review: A Rushed Launch

Ace Team and Nacon put The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu out as a finished, full-price release, not an early access build. That one decision is shaping the reaction to this game more than the Lovecraftian setting, the sanity mechanic, or the fact that you're hunting treasure off the Valdelian Coast in the year 1652. Reviewers agree on almost nothing else here. They agree on that.

The structure is simple and, on paper, pretty appealing. You're based on a ship called the Tempest, your hub between runs. Before each expedition you sign a contract with the captain, who lays out what he wants back: a loot quota, specific artifacts, survivors, whatever the job calls for. Then you row out to the mainland with up to three other players, an ox cart, and a priest named Father Escalona who follows you around and doubles as an emergency exit for anyone who goes down. Wander too far from your group and your sanity drains, the forest gets louder, and the game starts showing you things that may or may not be there. There's a real story with a proper ending, and you can keep playing expeditions after you finish it.

A good hook wrapped around a bad launch

When The Mound is working, it's working. Solo players and full squads both describe a jungle that gets oppressive the deeper you push, not dark for the sake of being dark, and creature designs that skip the usual rubber-suit horror-game look for something closer to wrong. I'll throw in my own detail here, since I've spent enough hours on Hunt: Showdown to notice it immediately: the HP bar on your character portrait is laid out almost identically to Hunt's, same segmented ring, same position. I'm not accusing anyone of copying homework. I'm saying if you've played Crytek's extraction shooter for a few hundred hours like I have, your eyes go straight to it, and it's a strange thing to lift from a game this different in tone.

No jump, no dodge, no block

Here's where the goodwill runs out fast. There is no jump button in this game. None. If your ox cart wedges itself against a rock, which it does, you can be stuck for good, because there's no way to hop over the obstacle pinning it. There's no dodge and, as of launch, no block either, so every melee fight boils down to trading hits with an enemy that moves faster than you do. Bleeding triggers constantly and bandages are scarce, to the point where more than one reviewer says they've died to blood loss more often than to the monsters themselves. Add a reported memory leak that turns buttery-smooth performance into a stutter-fest after roughly an hour, and you've got a first impression that fights the player before the jungle even gets a chance to.

One Steam reviewer put the design problem better than I could, so I'll just hand it over.

Challenging-hard is losing and knowing exactly what you should have done instead. Annoying-hard is losing when there was nothing you could have done at all.

— Steam user review

That's the whole combat loop in one line. Enemies overwhelm you in waves you can't out-position because you have no positioning tools, and tentacle grabs kill outright if you didn't happen to pack the specific item that counters them. I like a punishing game as much as the next person, but punishing has to mean the fight was winnable and I blew it. Strip out every defensive option and hand the monster your health bar instead, and skill stops being the variable. What's left is whether the run generator liked you today.

Nothing you find out there is actually yours

The armor and weapons you drag out of an expedition don't come home with you. They dissolve into tokens and permanent shop unlocks instead. Pull a rare mask off a dead cultist once, and it's yours forever, buyable with tokens as many times as you like. Find a flintlock that carried your whole run, and it just evaporates when the expedition ends, because only the token economy counts as progress, not the gear you actually earned. The character level system barely registers either; there's no meaningful sense that the hours you put in change how your survivor plays. Blocking, the one defensive tool every melee fight is missing, was reportedly announced on the developers' Discord as a feature coming later. That's a core mechanic still absent from a game sold at full retail price.

Solo play compounds all of it. You get an AI companion after your first mission, but he's slow, doesn't track fights well, and is sometimes just absent when things go bad. The priest wanders off on his own logic. Multiplayer isn't much smoother on the connective side: there's no room search, no filter, no player ID system, so grouping with a specific friend means both of you refreshing a public lobby list and hoping. Crossplay voice chat reportedly doesn't work reliably across platforms either, with Xbox players able to hear each other fine while PC players in the same group hear nothing.

Six characters, one build

There are four playable characters at launch with two more unlockable, six total, and every single one of them plays identically. No skills, no perks, nothing that makes picking one over another anything but cosmetic. The Deluxe Edition adds two extra characters plus weapon skins, a soundtrack, and an exclusive mission, and those extra characters are, again, cosmetic only: different look and voice, same moveset as everyone else. At least the skin-sharing is generous, letting you hand teammates your starting cosmetics for a run even if they don't own the DLC. It's a nice gesture that doesn't make up for a roster with no mechanical identity. This isn't the first period-set extraction shooter to catch our attention this year either; we've been keeping an eye on HUNGER's Napoleonic take on the genre, and the contrast in ambition versus execution is hard to ignore.

Wishlist it, check back later

Steam reviews split roughly the way you'd expect from a game this rough around a genuinely interesting core. The positive reviews lean on the atmosphere, the proximity voice chat, and the fact that no two runs play out quite the same. The negative ones point at the same list I just walked through: performance, missing basics, gear that doesn't stick, guns that need ammo you can't buy and stop working outright in the rain, which happens constantly. More than one reviewer lands on the same word for the actual problem: price. Full retail cost for a game several people are describing as an early access build in a full release's clothing is the part nobody's willing to let slide.

My take lines up with that. The setting, the sanity system, the dread of not knowing if the shape near the cart is a teammate or a hallucination, that stuff works and it's worth building a game around. But a jump button, a working block, gear that survives the trip home, and matchmaking that doesn't require prayer are not stretch goals. They're the floor. Wishlist The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, watch a few uncut runs before you decide, and check back in a few months to see whether Ace Team closes the gap between what this game wants to be and what it currently is.