The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu

Cthulu needs some soapy fat mounds.

this game is terrible its good for 1 hour dont buy this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

prettty fun but like it's optimization is terrible

i am Loving this game. the pressure it puts on team to move in stealth with haste and only talk when under attack is awsome. there are some sticking points where you fall in holes and cant get out. but the game is amazing. i've been playing and really enjoy it. the hard extracts under pressure from the forrest. the tripping Balls. the getting lost from team. it all makes the pressure and stress worth it when you make it back to your ship.

Played the game during the demo and have been pleasantly surprised by the release version. I should say that I have not played this game singleplayer or with randoms at all and I imagine, from my time playing, that neither of those would be very fun. So if you are not looking to play with friends then I wouldn't bother. Some of the main things I love about this game I think are also a big part of the reason it has a Mixed rating as of my writing this review (09/08/2026). - No loadout building and general lack of control When you pickup a contract you are given a pre-set loadout of gear which is scaled to the number of players. Each contract does seem to go for a style of loadout, so either all bows/crossbows or all polearms etc. However you will almost always find your self missing a weapon or bit of gear that you would really like to have and the game gives you no method to get that gear. For some people that will be a deal breaker but for me I love this choice. One of the weakest parts of a lot of Co-op games comes when it has been "solved". You have a loadout which is the mathmatically best one in the game and taking anything else would be pointless. With this way of handing out loadouts you are forced to deal with a loadout that is maybe not the best for the conditions. A example is the game throwing you into a map with thick fog and only loadouts and are purely ranged. Like I said, some people will hate this choice but for me it has been a breath of fresh air. This lack of player control also extends to things like time of day and weather. You can spend money to change these things somewhat but only by finding the Saints that are hidden across the maps. - The Maps Each mission in the main game has the same goal, head into a area, find a fort and bring the logbook back. Generally the fort is usually a decent distance into the map and for the first couple of hours I really had no idea how far into a given map I would need to go to actually find the logbook. The soft time limit on missions (Spend too long in the map and the forest will awake, eventually teleporting you away into a random corner to die) did make it really feel like we had no way to actually get the log books in time. I do think that a weakness of the game is that it really doesn't communicate that finding the Logbook and meeting your loot quota are not linked objectives. Once you realise that you will find you have more than enough time to race to the fort and get back with the logbook. If you are lucky you might be able to also meet the loot quota at the same time but really when going in the goal should be getting the logbook. Finding the logbook was also made easier once I noticed that there is a, often overgrown, cart track leading from the start of the map to the fort on all of the maps. So if you stick to this and race through you will be able to make it, as long as you don't make too much noise or leave your friends behind. Once you see this bit of design it makes even a unknown map a lot less scary to go up against, although doing this then meant that I skipped finding other bits of loot or gear that offer unlocks to take into further missions. - The Visuals This game is just amazing looking. It runs well on my system and the effects of mist, fog, rain and lighting coupled with the range of insanity effects that can happen make it all even better. This also extends to the design of the enemies, even the fairly mundane "zombies" look great. Shambling around in ragged clothes, often with knives and axes jutting from them or a freakish extra limb sticking from where it really shouldn't. You then get into the more extreme designs and they are all great as well, highlights for me and the human vultures and the tree folk. Just wonderfully nasty creations that will be coming at you out of the forest. -The Insanity When I saw the trailers with the insanity effects I was interested but I didn't really think that they would work beyond the first time. Nice little party tricks but nothing else. Boy was I wrong. The game has a lot of tricks to throw at you but some of the simplist are when it switches out the character model of your friends. A lot of times when it first happened it wouldn't cause issues, having your friend turn into a smoke ghost is odd but you can still tell who they are, until you realise that all the enemies have become smoke ghosts as well and you suddenly find yourself looking at a group of four of them bearing down on you. You didn't know your friend had run ahead and is now legging it away from that same group of monsters so can you really be blamed for shooting them in the face? It really is the way the game layers the effects onto you that makes things magical. Having your friends appear as enemies at the same time the forest around you is suddenly full of massive hordes of enemies that charge at you. Good communication will save you most of the time but I have had plenty of times where holding fire has got me whacked or vice versa. I haven't even really listed all the ways the game can mess with you and I am hoping that if they expand on anything in the future they expand on the list of ways the game can mess with you. So the game has a lot of great things but it isn't perfect and pretty much all my problems can fall under the header of - The Jank This game is janky. No way to get around it but it is far less janky that a lot of the games this studio have made before and crucially they have already shown that they are still working on polishing the game up. As of right now the major areas where the jank is most on show is in the meta progression and general polish of the UI and tutorials. On your ship you have a Lute player who you can find extra songs for on missions. As of right now none of the ones I have unlocked have appeared in my list to have him play. Not exactly the biggest issue but not great. Along with that the NPCs on the ship feel very flat, only two or three of them have any lines and none of the PCs that are not being used have any lines at all. It's a shame as the writing in the game is great, each Logbook found unlocks a short extract from it that tracks the descent into madness that the previous crew went through. The writing is solid and the delivery is great but another moment of jank is that the game doesn't highlight which is the new one when looking at the list. Not a problem at first but later entries will appear in the middle of the list instead of at the bottom so if you don't recall the last one you unlocked you will get confused and think you have just been given the same old unlock. The game also does a bad job of really explaining how things like isolation work so it can feel random when you get jumpscared by a monster after ending up alone. Really a lot of the mechanics are not explained super clearly and this is clearly the intent but having some sort of tooltip after the second or third time it happens to clue you in would help. Looking at a lot of negative reviews I do see a lot of people getting pissed off because they don't understand why they are getting teleported when the timer runs down or jumped or a number of other things. I will say that the jank is generally on a fairly low level compared to a lot of games. It's really just a final pass of polish that the game is missing to hit its peak.

The idea itself isn't new, but there are definitely some interesting solutions and mechanics here. Unfortunately, optimization seems to have been an afterthought. There are huge issues with screen resolution scaling, and the FPS is surprisingly low even on the lowest settings with an 8 GB graphics card. At the moment, the game feels very raw and unpolished. There's potential, but in its current state, it's simply way too expensive for what you get

exceptionnel