ACE Team, the studio behind cheerful puzzle games like Rock of Ages, is venturing into cosmic horror with The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, a cooperative expedition game where your grip on sanity matters as much as your gun. The title reimagines H.P. Lovecraft's 1940 novella by transplanting the action from 1928 Oklahoma to the Valvadian Forests of Chile in 1652, where up to four players board the galleon Tempestad in search of treasure and a pathway to K'n-yan, an underground city devoted to Cthulhu and the elder gods.
Players select from four historical characters, each with distinct voice lines and personalities but mechanically identical abilities. The lack of specialized roles keeps the focus on teamwork and shared decision-making. Before landing on the island, squads pick a contract that determines starting location, available equipment, and mission objectives. Early contracts in a recent demo felt manageable, tasking teams with simple objectives like locating treasure or retrieving a logbook. That comfort lasted about five minutes.
The island itself is a handcrafted jungle with no procedural generation. Skeletal remains of previous explorers litter the landscape alongside rotting ship timber and abandoned camps. A countdown timer warning that "the forest will awake in X hours" creates constant pressure to secure objectives and leave. Despite the natural beauty of the environment, the underlying sense of dread never lifts.
Gear management becomes critical quickly. Each player's inventory space is severely limited, forcing tough choices about what weapons, consumables, and treasures to carry. A poor loadout decision can cripple an entire run. In one scenario, a player loaded up on firearms only to have a storm roll in, rendering all guns useless due to rain. The team that designated clear responsibilities and specialized roles enjoyed more success, but even careful planning can unravel against the island's unpredictability.
Insanity Effects Rewrite Reality Per Player
The game's signature mechanic distorts each player's perception individually. When sanity erodes, the world around a single player becomes unreliable. Another teammate confidently walked into a pit filled with spikes and decomposing bodies because their screen showed only solid ground and a shrine. From everyone else's perspective, the pit was obvious and deadly. Their death came instantly upon contact.
Other insanity symptoms prove equally disorienting without being immediately fatal. In one instance, a player's entire surroundings turned blood red, obscuring an undead creature called a Y'm-bhi that emerged from the trees and attacked while the afflicted player was isolated. The visual confusion created openings for ambush and injury.
Enemies range from traditional zombies to more exotic horrors. The team encountered an unkillable ghost-bat entity, a creature made of writhing vines that binds victims in place, and a giant centipede that one player vomited on, triggering it to chase the group relentlessly. If a player dies and teammates fail to revive them in time, the corpse gets consumed by the forest and resurfaces as a corrupted, hostile version that actively hunts survivors.
The technical setup uses peer-to-peer connectivity with one player hosting the session. This architecture sidesteps the server shutdown issues plaguing other multiplayer games. Progress including ranks, unlocked areas, and logbooks saves to individual profiles, creating incentive to return and replay with friends. Solo play is possible with AI teammates or purely alone, though the difficulty scaling suggests this approach is a gauntlet. Critically, progress doesn't transfer between platforms, so switching from console to PC means starting over completely.
The Mound launches July 15 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC with full crossplay support. The demo left an impression of a game that respects player fear while delivering meaningful stakes in every decision.
Author Emily Chen: "The insanity system is the real star here, turning your teammates into unreliable witnesses and making communication feel fragile when sanity cracks."
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