The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review - 4-Player PvE Mound of Doo Doo?
- Ole Gamer Joe
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
I’m not opposed to any game that lets me probe a butthole within my first 20 minutes of playing, though, now that I think about it, this might be the first time I've been able to do so. Welcome to The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, a 4-Player PVE Lovecraftian adventure brought to us by Ace Team and publisher Nacon. This shiny new title promises vast expeditions full of treasure hunts plagued by cosmic horrors, but instead offers a massive pile of digital doo-doo that will easily make the Razzies list at the end of what has already been a somewhat underwhelming 2026.
The recommended way of playing The Mound is naturally, with a group of willing participants, but that’s a terrible thing to do to your friends, so maybe try to find some players online or go it alone (if you dare). The best solution would be to not play this game at all, but since this is a review, sacrifices of my own sanity must be made. On the topic of sanity, that is something you can lose both in real life and in the game while playing The Mound. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We’ll start with how a round of The Mound plays out.
You’ll begin each new expedition aboard your ship, the Tempestad, which also serves as your main hub. Here, players may select between four characters, with two more unlockable for a total of six. Don’t get too excited, though, because every one of these characters plays exactly the same. No special skills or perks to be found here. Once you choose your adventurer, it’s off to the main deck to select your expedition and outfit yourself with a variety of armor, spears, and all manners of old-timey weaponry. The ship is also where you’ll spend your hard-earned booty on hot ticket items like an all-but-worthless map of the island, torches, and other upgrades.
If you’re wondering why I skipped over the story, it’s because it really doesn’t matter and is, quite frankly, an insult to our intelligence. In fact, the whole Lovecraftian vibe here feels very forced, stitched together like the human centipede and forcing us all to eat shit and live.
An optional prologue, which is single-player only, tries to flesh things out a bit, pun intended, as we are shown a dizzying array of nonsensical lore that is vaguely Lovecraft-adjacent, including a penisless Ken doll of a slate blue entity. I’d make a blue balls joke, but there weren’t even any balls to speak of. All of this is to tell the player that the reason for this expedition is a glorified treasure hunt. The captain is in it for the loot, and we’re just the hired guns along for the ride, practically being sacrificed to the Lovecraftian gods.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the core gameplay. Once you’ve selected your expedition and set out on a rowboat, it’s time to bumble about on a massive expanse of jungle. Each locale is full of treasures to uncover, which can be loaded into your ox cart. This cart is also where you can store other useful stuff as your inventory is limited. Storing treasures is key to your success as, should you survive an expedition, you are rewarded based on how many items of value you’re able to collect. You’ll also have to ration out your utility items like gunpowder and bandages to survive the quest. It’s worth noting that, in co-op, you do have the ability to drop things to assist your comrades, and difficulty will scale to the number of players. Also, if one of you falls in battle, you can revive one another using salts to prevent their corpse from becoming corrupted. If you’re too far gone, your corpse will become just another enemy on the island for your party to contend with.
Each expedition comes with a main objective, which ranges from collecting a set amount of treasures to finding a logbook or defeating a big baddie. Standing in your way are lumbering foes of all shapes and sizes that will attack you from any angle at any time, including a blood worm that you puke out that turns against you and just won’t quit. Combat is pretty standard, nothing to write home about here. Guns are pretty slow to load, which I imagine is meant to capture the time period but ends up making things feel frustrating and sluggish. You’ll need to switch between items in your inventory to heal or reload, which can also feel a bit clunky at times. There is a melee attack, which is all but useless when you’re being swarmed by a mob of monstrosities. This is all made worse by the Mound’s sanity system, which I really couldn’t get a good feel for. It seemed to happen at random times during gameplay, turning my screen dark and serving as another obstacle in an already obstacle-filled experience. These hallucinations aren’t the worst idea on paper; however, in practice, it just doesn’t stick the landing. I like the idea of not knowing whether my hallucinations were causing monsters to look like teammates or vice versa, but the screen darkening or blood rain effects made it all look like mud. Before I knew it, I was often dead, and I didn't even know why. If you want to take the strategic coward’s way out, you can retreat early with the loot you’ve managed to scour; however, it’s kind of a bitch move.
The game recommends sticking with your group so you can be sure who to trust and that your teammates are still on the right side of sanity; however, having to be tethered to your group feels like a core gameplay flaw in a title that is literally all about exploration. I was punished for breaking away from my squad, and while playing single-player, your optional co-op AI character is a complete moron. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unplayable in single-player, but honestly, it’s a bad time either way, so I wouldn’t recommend you play it in any mode. There are 18 total locations in all, and there is no procedural generation, so in theory, you could learn the lay of the land over time, but again, that would involve playing more of the game, which at its core just isn’t a great time.
For a game called the Mound, the graphics fall incredibly flat. Environments all look the same and start to blur together nearly immediately, characters are as expressionless as a mom with too much Botox and have an unintentional uncanny valley look to them that makes them unsettling for the wrong reasons. There are some creative creature designs on display here, like hand-foot-mouth disease man, RFK’s brain worm, large shadow bird, and clingy tendril guy, but their novelty wears out quickly because you’ll find yourself facing the same foes with the same clunky attacks again and again and again. Not to pile on the graphics too heavily, but there were also some glitches, which I wasn't sure whether to attribute to the loss of my sanity (in OR out of game) or a genuine bug. My carriage and teammate became ghostly apparitions at one point, quickly popping back into focus when I got close enough to them. That’s not to mention the texture popping that was nearly constant and fluctuating frame rate that bounced like a bad father when it’s time to pay child support.
There are many times throughout gameplay where the game will switch from your standard first-person mode to a third-person view, which seems to imply that it would be possible to switch your gameplay to third-person, but unfortunately for my motion-sick gameplay partner, this was not the case. Such a missed opportunity to make this game more enjoyable and accessible. C’mon devs, it’s RIGHT THERE!!!
Sound design is equally forgettable and unremarkable. A game like this is made or broken by its atmosphere. Rustling in the brush, an eerie groan from somewhere nearby, the distant call of an enormous beast you just know is tracking you down, the hollow crunch of your footsteps in the forest when you know you’re not alone. Some of these elements are here, but they all sound like they were ripped straight from a free sound effect library. There’s almost no soundtrack to speak of, and what you hear most is your character’s clearly abysmal cardio as they attempt to flee from whatever creature is currently chasing them. There is one guy aboard the Tempestad that will play you a little tune, if you want to count that as a soundtrack.
We could go on all day about the bugs, the glitches, the aimless wandering, poor map design, bad tracking and inventory systems, wonky technical performance, scary facial animations, weak core game design, repetition, bad single player, somehow equally bad multiplayer, uninteresting characters, crappy upgrades, crappy hub area with stupid NPCs that say pointless things, and equally stupid AI comrade to “help you,” middling combat, random deaths that inexplicably occur, lack of 3rd person view even though the potential is clearly there, snooze fest of a story, weird items like the one that kinda sorta points you towards treasures if you tap on it, a strange proximity voice chat system that sucks, lack of music, and general lack of fun. There’s more, but are we good here? But at least there’s anal probing. I’m not gonna filter this, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a mound of poo, and I fear even the developers know it. Can it be fixed with patches? Maybe, but probably not. And with so many other options available, will anyone truly stick around to find out? Some unique ideas are present, and I can appreciate going the extra mile in having crossplay across all available platforms, but the whole Lovecraftian thing has been done, dare I say, cosmically better than this, and you, as a player, deserve better for yourself. It’s been a tough year for Nacon, and unfortunately, this isn’t going to fix anything. And let’s be honest, in a few months’ time there’s probably no community of note playing online anymore. I am awarding this turd the dreaded indie Krampus, their second from us this year.
