The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu - Deluxe Edition

My first expedition into The Mound lasted about twenty minutes before the jungle swallowed my crew whole, and I immediately wanted to go back. That tension is real, and it is the game's greatest achievement. Developed by ACE Team and published by Nacon, this is a co-op extraction roguelite set during the 1600s, loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft's novella of the same name. You and up to three others land on cursed South American islands, push through dense jungle using machetes and knives to clear a path, scavenge treasure, recover logbooks from abandoned forts to unlock forward staging areas, and try to make it back to the boat before the place kills you. The loop is tight and the tension is almost always running. The atmosphere does the heavy lifting here, and it does it exceptionally well. Unreal Engine 5 renders a jungle that feels hostile before a single enemy appears. When the weather shifts, blood-red light bleeds through the canopy, howls echo around you, and shapes move in the fog. The sanity system, clearly inspired by the old Eternal Darkness mechanic, starts distorting your perception mid-expedition: flies crawl across your screen, teammates morph into enemies, and figures appear in the tree line that may or may not be real. It is the kind of creeping psychological horror that builds dread instead of relying on jump-scares. The spatial audio system earns its keep too. Stray too far from your group and proximity-based voice chat cuts out, which sounds like a gimmick until you realize you cannot hear your teammate screaming for help anymore. Weapon variety covers the era authentically: flintlock pistols, axes, rapiers, crossbows, and pocketable knives. The era-specific feel is intentional. Firearms are slow to raise, aiming is inaccurate, and inventory cycling is sluggish. Some reviewers charitably call this deliberate vulnerability design. Others call it clunky, and they are not wrong either. Combat against ghouls, worm-people, and stranger alien-tier enemies often dissolves into a frustrating lottery where backstabs and timing feel unreliable. When an expedition is going well the combat tension works. When it is going badly, eating a ration feels like time has stopped. The game's biggest structural flaw is how badly it needs a full squad. Solo play exists, and there is a short standalone prologue, but the systems were built around cooperation, shared resources, and communication. An AI companion option exists for solo players, but it does not come close to compensating for the absence of real teammates. Playing alone means getting swarmed quickly, losing an entire expedition's worth of progress after fifteen minutes of careful exploration, and feeling the weight of systems that were never really designed with you in mind. This is a game that earns its atmosphere with friends and punishes you for not having them. For a specific kind of player, those who enjoy Phasmophobia-adjacent co-op tension, Lovecraftian world-building that does not hand-hold, and extraction loops with real stakes, The Mound delivers something genuinely uncommon. It is rough around the edges, the combat will test your patience, and the progression system needs more depth to keep repeat expeditions fresh. But the moments when it works, when your group is split, the sanity is fraying, something vast is circling in the dark, and someone has to decide whether to push deeper or run, are the kind of moments worth hunting for.

Alex · Scout Team

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