Mundaun by Hidden Fields
Year: 2021
Platforms: Lots! Played on Steam
Usual price: £15.99 (Steam) but often on offer for less than £5
Saves: Manually at savepoints, and automatically at key points
A couple of hours in, my ears latch on to the correct way to pronounce what I’m playing: mun-day-yun, three sounds rolling downhill, rather than a long dr_au_n out single second half. It strikes me as a twisted-up mountain, with all the right parts there, albeit with a mind of their own.
Indeed, the game says that its characters all “have their own obscure spoken language” – I’d initially assumed it was a swiss-german style thing, but it would seem apt for the words you hear to be unique to this game, fenced off physically and culturally as they are by wooden gates, icy lakes, impassable rivers, and the looming, dark peaks of mount Mundaun itself. (Edit: An old Edge review claims it to be Romansh.)
A single road leads to the start of the adventure. You don’t know what lies around the corner, let alone the maps of the region at this point, yet you instinctively know this is the only way in, the only way out. As you wander around the valley and find relaxing benches to sit on, your journal fills with hand drawn sketches of the topography, just sufficient to get your bearings but never modern or accurate enough to stop thinking.
But by this point it’s clear that it’s not just the maps which are drawn by hand. Either your notebook has bled out into the world, or the world has infested the papers in front of you – everything here comes from the end of a pencil, daubed as it is in corrosive charcoal lines. Once it is everywhere you no longer see it unless you look closely, but the monochrome textures inscribe the Mundaun landscape with more soul than any I’ve seen in a long time – HD, genAI, or IRL. It is clear you are wandering through someone’s fevered dream here, but the dream is everything, all encompassing.
As with all good dreams, it’s hard to relax properly. The horror-noir B-movie bones crunch beneath your feet as you walk, even as the distant horizon sinks below the mists to make you hold your breath. The benches are merely a way to plot out the waiting ghouls. Radio stations let you choose your ambience for a moment, only for the perfectly-crafted soundtrack to put you back on high alert seconds later.
Mundaun is a classic folk-horror adventure – Year Walk meets The Shining (which partially inspired the game, according to Wikipedia – that does a lot of things right – with a gorgeous amount of perception and craft about it. There are changes in momentum that threw me at first – hitting the first stealth section brought a sense of shock that I could have worked through, but instead I scurried over to the discussion forums for a certain amount of courage to persevere.
And here is the sign of a good folk-horror experience, I think – the unnerving sense that gnaws at the edge of the screen should also be an oddly cosy feeling. A glamour of strange wonder that you want to bob around in. Mundaun, with its textural intrigue, did this so well, and perhaps I wasn’t prepared for anything more proactive.
But I persisted and snuck and dashed and drove and tobogganed and forked and drank coffee. And, I can say, it was well worth it.
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