The Mound Omen of Cthulu Review
When you were a kid, did you ever dig a hole in your backyard? If you have, you know the feeling. You dig and dig, hoping a certain something incredible is waiting for you. But, eventually you’re just staring at dirt. Well, that’s The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu in a nutshell. ACE Team and Nacon assembled a strikingly good-looking excavation site, then forgot to bury anything worth finding underneath it.
I’ll give credit where it’s due. The jungle ACE Team designed is true eye-candy. Fog rolls through the trees in thick sheets, torchlight flickers against ancient stone ruins, and the whole island carries an unsettling, heavy weight with it. Character models and creature designs lean hard into cosmic horror without tipping into cartoonish gore. To the dev team’s credit, I found myself stopping mid-mission more than once just to take in a sunset breaking through the trees. Not something I expected, but was pleasantly surprised to find.
Sounds Good
The audio design is another part of The Mound that clearly received love and attention. Distant howls, snapping branches, and half-heard whispers do a lot of the heavy lifting in building atmosphere. The spatial mixing genuinely sells the idea that danger is closing in from a specific direction rather than just “somewhere” off in the fog, and dare I say, The Mound would be next to unplayable without it.
Unfortunately, that’s about where my patience for compliments runs dry.
Let’s start with optimization. The Mound performs fine in open coastal areas, but the microstuttering in heavily forested areas is unbearable. There’s no excuse for a 2026 release stumbling this badly on hardware that should chew through it without breaking a sweat. Layer on random audio dropouts, where dialogue or ambient sound just vanishes mid-mission for no reason, and you’ve got a bun that needed another six months in the oven before launch.
Please Bring Friends
Playing solo makes every one of those problems worse. The Mound is clearly designed with a squad in mind, and stripped of that company, missions turn into a slow trudge through painfully empty corridors. Nothing props up the pace when you’re on your own. Boredom sets in fast. And once it did for me, I wasn’t ever able to shake the feeling of wanting to play something else. Anything else.
Then there’s the progression system, or the lack of one. Upgrades only apply to the mission you’re currently on, evaporating the second you sail home. There’s zero incentive to push deeper into the jungle for better loot when none of it carries forward. Your gear loadout is locked in before you even leave the boat, which strips away any sense of choice. Every expedition ends up playing exactly like the last, which in turn hurts the spontaneity. The Mound is built on a system of risk versus reward, but these systems only work if the reward sticks around long enough to matter. Here, it simply doesn’t. That disconnect leaves the whole game feeling like an unfinished prototype instead of something to work on over the next months/years.
Multiplayer should be the saving grace here, and instead it’s a painful joke. Getting a friend into your session is needlessly complicated, bogged down by matchmaking hiccups and connection issues that totally ruin the experience. If your core pitch to players is “bring your buddies,” the least you can do is make that process painless from the jump.
Combat Woes
And then there’s combat, which is easily the biggest letdown of The Mound’s many, many letdowns. Swinging a sword feels like brushing an enemy with a pool noodle until they lie in a heap at your feet. Guns fare no better, lacking any real punch or tactile feedback when you land a shot. This is combat that would’ve felt dated two generations ago, let alone now, in a genre full of games that have nailed this feeling for years.
Strip away the fog, the ruins, and the booty, and what’s left is a gameplay loop so thin it barely qualifies as one. Pick a mission. Pick a loadout. Trudge down a linear path, survive some sloppy combat, grab some (admittedly gorgeous) treasure, and head home. Rinse, repeat, regret. I kept waiting for a twist that would make The Mound worth my time, but, unfortunately, it never came.
***A Steam key was provided for this review***
The Good
- Nice visuals
- Solid audio
- Treasure feels like treasure
The Bad
- Horrifically boring
- Awful combat
- Bugs, bugs, bugs
- Feels like an unfinished product
