The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review

Can you play with madness and survive? In GameWatcher’s The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu review, we head to the jungle to find out.

Have you ever played a frustratingly punishing game and wondered aloud, ‘‘Why am I carrying on with this?’’ For me, the answer is usually that there’s something I want to see, and it’s worth pushing through the pain. Now, is it always worth it in the end? No, I can count plenty of games where I look at time spent and shake my head, wondering why I didn’t tap out much sooner. A lesson should be learned to trust that instinct, but there’s nearly always a tantalising, ‘’What if the payoff is worth it?’’

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu from ACE Team could be seen this way because, on both narrative and gameplay levels, it takes you on that journey of self-doubt and begrudging perseverance.

The game is set in the sixteenth century, and you are a member of an expedition that is stationed off the coast of a mysterious South American jungle. You and your crewmates have been tasked with exploring said jungle for two reasons: supplies and untold riches.

Because at the heart of this land is the titular Mound, which legend says contains treasures beyond imagination. The small print of that is that it’s a deeply, deeply cursed place that has claimed many a wannabe treasure hunter.

Not that your captain gives a damn about that. You are the canary in the coal mine who also happens to be a glorified pack mule for the unholy idols and questionable goods found in the jungle. He’ll offer contracts that give you a selection of items such as weaponry, rations, and tools to complete the job, and he’ll expect a certain amount of value brought back to the galleon from your journey, maybe even a logbook or two to help find the way to the almost mythical Mound for the ultimate payoff.

What do you get out of this, you might ask. Well, from your captain, a pat on the head or stern admonishment, depending on how you do. From the jungle, torturous dark corruption and myriad horrors come out to rip you to pieces mentally and physically. Taking a step back, it’s a pretty crappy deal.

For the characters, the rock-and-hard-place nature of their predicament spurs them deeper into the jungle, made to endure more and more unspeakable horrors just to maintain the shred of hope they’ll get to share in the infinite riches of an ancient civilisation. A part of them, and by extension, a part of you, knows it surely can’t be worth all this torture, but given the circumstances, it’s either mortal exile or the tentacle-strewn mystery box. 

For the player, the motivation is naturally different. The reward of riches is largely pointless, as profits tend to go straight to the captain, and you get some trinkets to upgrade your gear to slightly higher quality. So it’s about seeing just how deep this monster hole goes and embracing an intoxicating co-operative premise.

The jungle has an arsenal of malicious tricks up its sleeve, and chief among them is playing with your perception of reality. While there is always a presence that inhabits the jungle, it often lies fairly dormant. Shambling corpses of failed treasure hunters will stagger about in the undergrowth, but they tend to leave you be unless you rile them up.

From the off, it’s crucial to understand that this place is a singular beast that can conjure up more threats should you provoke it. Run about, trample through crackling bushes, or blast a flintlock pistol at the local wildlife, and you awaken the jungle. From there, it treats you like an infection and sets out its defences accordingly.

The deeper your intrusion into this space, and the closer you get to The Mound, the harder the jungle works to consume and eradicate your soul, leaving an anguished husk to feed the soil. This is why teamwork is crucial if you’re to live to pillage another day.

But the jungle is devious, and ACE Team has ensured that the comfort of other players is a rather threadbare blanket. Simply spending time here is enough to chip away at your sanity, and naturally, having teammates means you can cover more ground and get out of there quicker, right?

Man Against Nature

I’m fascinated by the setup for The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. The age-old tale of man thinking he has dominion over nature and getting his collective backside handed to him and his brains cooked by a hostile ecosystem is a delicious horror setup that the game actually makes you buy into through sheer hubris. Why can’t you tame this jungle? Why can’t you defeat these unspeakable forces of evil and claim the riches they keep?

The Mound is gleeful in its attempts to shred player ego by ensuring players’ worst qualities are almost too tempting to resist. Impatience, greed, cowardice, and unsocial behaviour are surefire ways to have your expedition end in miserable failure. The longer you spend in the jungle, the worse things get, so the game pushes you to split up and find more loot, lest you come back with even a penny less value than expected by your greedy leader.

Of course, the corruption takes hold quicker if you’re alone, and should one of your number fall away from your eyes and ears, you won’t know. The in-game chat is spatial, so you can only hear teammates in earshot. Yes, you can whistle to give others a ping of your current coordinates, but the manipulative powers of the jungle mean you can’t even trust that. There are no outlines, player names, or chatboxes, so once you drift apart, the risks grow exponentially.

Should you reunite, you can’t exactly relax then either. Players can be corrupted, and the jungle essentially creates a puppet copy of their body that seeks out the remaining members of the party. No matter how many times it happened, the cycle of noticing we had more teammates than normal, and the imposter lunged, body writhing with wormlike tentacles to cause instant chaos, I got caught off guard. 

It sows paranoia and distrust that bleeds through into every quest going forward. Sure, you could bypass all that by chatting over Discord, but you’d be denying yourself the most exquisitely unpleasant experience The Mound has to offer.

The audiovisual trickery wouldn’t work half as well if ACE Team had failed to put the work into sowing those seeds. The jungle is full of detail and offers plenty of visual traps hidden or obscured by dense foliage, gloomy darkness, and a cocktail of sound that makes you stop and listen to be sure what you just heard.

Exploration of the game’s maps is not open, as the environments are largely a series of pathways and points of interest dressed in jungle decor. As dismissive as that might sound of the game’s level design, the simplicity is a good compromise in maintaining a leash on the player without truly getting them lost. The visual shifts the maps take as your psyche crumbles, plus the time of day and weather affecting how everything is presented, mean that familiarity is always being eaten away by uncertainty.

Cracks in Time

The downside of everything The Mound does to mess with players is that it brings some frustrations. Relying on others not to screw things up is not an uncommon problem, but in a game where the very world around you responds in increasingly hostile ways can make this aggravating after a while (I’m sure others felt the same about me).

The balance of caution, communication, and stealth getting upset usually ramps up combat encounters- and while there’s a risk-and-reward nature to tackling the manifestations of the jungle, going toe-to-tentacle with the horrors of The Mound, combat isn’t anywhere near smooth enough to make it a worthwhile strategy. 

Which is as it should be, because in pure story terms, these are unrelenting forces you can never possibly hope to vanquish fully, but that doesn’t fully excuse how hit-and-miss combat actually is. This is the sixteenth century, so any firepower is effective, but slow and loud. Melee often leaves you swinging in blind panic, as threats can shamble out of nowhere (or be imaginary), and early weapons leave you chipping away at even the simplest of foes.

There’s a learning curve, naturally, but shreds of frustration do still crop up even as you come to understand the limitations of combat.

Then there’s the issue of repetition. The concept behind The Mound is executed well enough that you’d actively want other horror fans to check it out and experience such a refreshing multiplayer game, but the promise of The Mound isn’t strong enough to experience the mind-melting terrors over and over again without immunity building up.

I appreciate that ACE Team has prioritised its lean and mean vision over the dilution of variety, though, and I can’t really see how you add to the mechanics of what’s there without compromising what makes it such an alluring online horror experience. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is the most engrossing online horror experience I’ve had since Hunt: Showdown. Its unapologetic, manipulative structure is perfect for birthing anecdotes. Its shortcomings in potential longevity and combat are offset by the purity of its unsettling horror.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu review code for PS5 provided by the publisher.

The Mound is out July 15, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.