Mulaka

I kept coming back to one question while playing Mulaka: how often does a video game introduce you to a living culture you knew almost nothing about? Lienzo, a studio based in Chihuahua, Mexico, built this 3D action-adventure around the Tarahumara people of the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the depth of care here is evident from the first loading screen. The low-poly art style was reportedly shaped by Tarahumara geometric artwork, and the result lands somewhere between a painted canyon mural and an early 3D platformer rendered in warm terracotta light. The soundtrack uses traditional instruments rather than generic fantasy orchestration, and it stays quietly present in the background like a fire you didn't notice until the room went cold. You play as a Sukurúame, a shaman warrior with the rare ability to perceive the spirit world alongside the physical one. The loop across each area asks you to find three keystones to unlock a boss door, mixing combat encounters, platforming challenges, and puzzles along the way. As you win the favour of demigods, you gain the ability to transform into different animal forms - bird, bear, snake - each of which opens up new combat options and changes how you move through the landscape entirely. A multi-use spirit energy resource ties the vision mechanic, the transformations, and the flight ability together, which forces genuine choices during the more chaotic fights. Boss encounters lean into this system well, and several of them stand as the game's clearest moments of design confidence. The combat toolkit is light attack, heavy attack, spear throw, and dodge, with herb-crafted potions rounding out the options as you progress. Critics were split almost exactly where you'd expect: the combat feels fluid and punchy when the enemy counts are manageable, but the absence of a proper lock-on system and an occasionally unhelpful camera turn larger mob encounters into something you survive rather than enjoy. The three-soul health system, where healing requires a vulnerable five-second ritual, adds a small tactical wrinkle that can feel tense or unfair depending on the encounter design. Puzzles are straightforward throughout, never pushing back hard enough to slow things down significantly, which is either a relief or a mild disappointment based on your appetite for that kind of friction. Difficulty sits at a single default setting with no adjustment, and some reviewers found the combat too forgiving while others found specific boss phases punishing for the wrong reasons. What holds all of this together is intent. Lienzo worked closely with the Tarahumara community, and that relationship shows in the texture of the world rather than just its surface decoration. Each enemy comes with a short codex entry that explains its roots in real mythology. The landscapes reference actual Sierra Tarahumara geography. The oral history of the tribe is woven into the progression without ever being forced on you as exposition. For players who lean into it, Mulaka becomes genuinely educational in a way that feels organic rather than museum-placard dry. For players who ignore the cultural layer entirely, the action-adventure underneath is competent but not exceptional. A Metacritic score of 67 lands about where the game deserves to sit if you evaluate it purely on mechanical polish. Steam players have been considerably warmer, with the community response skewing positive. This is a game for people who find meaning in craft that exceeds budget. It runs short, the controls have edges that were never fully smoothed out, and the NPC dialogue is thin. None of that erases the fact that Mulaka does something most games with ten times its resources never attempt: it treats a living culture as primary material rather than aesthetic dressing, and it earns most of the weight it tries to carry.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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