Don’t trust your eyes.
Stumbling through a dense jungle retreating with our spoils, our wagon was working its way back to our boat. With my teammate close behind me, I hear growls nipping at my ears. I turn around and am faced with a creature wrapped in tendrils and a desire to rip me in half. I call out to my teammate who has made me aware they too are locked in battle with another monster all their own. I slash at this creature, only to get attacked myself, and before we knew it, our monsters were gone and we were alone, realizing that our eyes had been playing tricks with us, as we were each other’s monster and didn’t even know it.
Despite several failed expeditions, with ships capsized and destroyed just off the shore of a nearby island, the Tempestad, a modest ship, has docked near the shore of a mysterious island, and you, as one of four expendable assets, are sent out to retrieve any and all left over trinkets, food, and supplies in an effort to build up your captain’s fortune. However, for as simple as that premise is, the execution is anything but. This jungle is hungry, salivating, and it will mess with your mind in order to enjoy its meal.
Based on the 1940 novella, ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft himself, you really do feel the Lovecraftian elements that make up this extraction experience. While there are elements of a story here, with each playable character having some sort of backstory, it all feels largely irrelevant and only there to stitch together some connecting narrative between each expedition. Honestly, I don't see anyone looking to play or engage with this game based on its story, and that's fine.
Each of the four starting characters are brought to this misfortune and venture out to the island for treasures, food, and supplies to appease their captain. They sign contracts, which are your missions, and each mission supplies you with a variety of items at the forefront. Machetes, rapiers, armor, bandages, as well as salts to revive downed teammates, are only a few options available to you at first, as well as match lock rifles and bows, giving you ranged options, even if aiming on controller never once felt good.
The Mound; Omen of Cthulhu is, essentially, the same overall experience as something like Lethal Company. You are tasked with bringing back a certain value of goods, and then escaping with it. However, what does sour the experience somewhat is that nothing you bring back is relevant to your next outing. You're not finding new armor or rifles, or new melee options, those are locked to the mission when you approach each individual contract. This removes that thrill of escaping with something cool to use later on, and honestly, that's normally what keeps you engaged with the extraction genre.
While you do collect tokens for your progress, the progression system is massively shallow and shockingly limited. There isn't anything here that feels like you are increasing your chances of survival for the next run or the after that. You can buy a map, but I never really found it useful. About the only item that I would buy is the coin that shows you the way to treasure, speeding up your collection gathering and getting you off the island and back to safety.
While you can upgrade your current weapon before you head to shore, dying or completing the mission removes it from your hands for the next mission, so you never really get attached to any weapon in particular. If anything, I would say upgrading your weapons almost feels like you are being tricked, given those upgrades are simply temporary.
While you can upgrade them with tokens, you can also swap it for another version. However, the differences for the amount of tokens it requires is sometimes absolute nonsense of a pixel width of improvement. Sadly, armor didn't seem to be able to be improved, as weapons were my only option.
What I found odd is that each character is essentially just a skin of one type, a different pair of hands from one to the next. There are no classes, no stats from one to the other, and while you can fashion your own classes from the armor, weapons, and items, that is about as deep as it gets. And, to complicate matters even more, if you are playing with a full crew of four, some contracts don't offer enough weapons for all of you, meaning some will go to shore with nothing but their knife and hope you find something to protect yourself with. While you can swap the look of your knife, it is so small in your hand that it rarely means anything. It’s like cosmetics for a first-person game, it largely is lost in translation.
Once you've selected a contract, which will detail your starting equipment, the difficulty, and the amount of value you need to find, you'll then choose your location. There are 18 locations across the Island, and your arrival will vary from the time of day to the weather. From sunny days to a complete downpour, which makes ranged attacks useless, each new location must be earned by finding a logbook and then escaping with it. You'll also find a few additional survivors, but without unique stats from one to the next, these discoveries are largely pointless.
When you get to the island, you'll have a brief period where everything seems fine, calm even. It'll mention that you have a few “in-game” hours before the jungle awakes, This is where being quiet, not firing off your guns, or slashing away at branches, which, I might add, can snap back and cause you to take bleeding damage, can pay off in those initial first few minutes. However, once the island comes alive, it comes at you full force, with the amount of comrades you bring with you amping up the difficulty.
While you can take on this adventure in a solo player capacity, it's not something I recommend for the long haul. Sure, you do get an AI sidekick, but they rarely are effective and their inclusion can actually work against you, should they die and then be resurrected by the jungle. Playing solo means you cannot be easily saved and death comes a bit easier. The difficulty is ramped down, but only marginally. It's also a lot easier and quicker to reach your target value with multiple people chipping in.
Either way, once you dock on the island, you'll have a cart pulled by an Ox following you, at least to where it can fit. I did find it extremely frustrating that the cart can block paths and even if it looks like you can skirt by it, it has a large hit box that blocks you. You can blow a horn to find where it is, but the jungle will be alerted to you and its location as well. What I love about the cart is that not only can you sling deers or firewood on it to increase your supplies, or bring collapsed teammates there to revive them, but it leaves a path of salt behind you, leading you back to the boat. This makes it easy to high tail it out of there when it gets a bit too hot.
Despite adapting existing and widely used mechanics and gameplay systems, The Mound brings with it a lesser used gameplay mechanic that we really haven’t seen used in some time. ACE Team has brought us its own spin on Eternal Darkness’ Sanity system, which causes all sorts of hallucinations. From flies covering the screen, screams and figures in the distance only viewable to a single player, to teammates turning into trees, or in the case of the review’s opening paragraph, causing your teammates to be disguised as your black tendrilled foes. There are several other fascinating hallucinations across the game, that while can be easily debunked as a real threat, are still wildly entertaining, and should be something the team continues to add more to to not have players experiencing the same ones over and over again.
When playing in a group, once you've been “killed”, your body will resurrect and then stalk and attack your allies on its own, with you simply at the driver seat of the camera. Once you've been downed, you can then be revived, albeit with a huge centipede exiting your throat in horrible fashion. It's pretty disgusting, but so in tone with what this game offers. And, you’ll then need to kill said centipede, with it slithering about.
When it comes to combatting the efforts the jungle throws at you, that's where the inexperience of the team is highlighted more than ever. With only a handful of Indie Games on their resume, from Rock of Ages, Abyss Odyssey, and Zeno Clash, this is their most high profile and visually striking title yet. Still, while the game does visually look solid, taking advantage of Unreal Engine 5, the gameplay itself leaves a lot to be desired.
Aiming rifles, or the bow is sluggish, melee feels janky, and hit detection is spotty in most circumstances. It can be inconsistent when attacking head on and especially from their backside, which is supposed to perform a backstab, but can often just perform the slash, if it connects at all. Thankfully, arrows and bolts are reusable, allowing you to pick up spent ammunition. Aiming is significantly better with a mouse than a controller, which is why I rarely used firearms.
Enemies can also attack you from behind, causing you to stumble. This results in a cutscene of your character falling, and often facing the wrong way to escape. I was running back to the boat, and this cutscene, which pans out to show your character falling in third person, would pop up like a half dozen times. Hell, watching the kill-cam of your resurrected body made me really want a third person camera as well as unique skins to each of the characters.
Now, while the combat itself is merely satisfactory, and doesn't look to reinvent the wheel, the atmosphere and tension is absolutely fantastic. The horror elements, the sanity distractions, and the abundance of strong enemy designs is top notch. From tendril slashing monsters, giant spiders, to red-glowing eyes stalking you from the trees, to the brief teleporting of you to unknown and disturbing locations, with Eldritch horrors on display, the visual and aesthetic experience of The Mound is truly stunning, which is why its performance issues are that much more depressing.
The console versions of The Mound are questionable right now, as they seem to be exact ports of the PC version with little to no optimization done to accommodate them to their platform. The Series S version was borderline unplayable, and I don't use that term like most who say any 30fps game is “unplayable”. The stuttering and visuals were so poor that it made me sick trying to even push through a round. How this got past certification is beyond me. Series X does fair largely better, but there is a softness to the visuals and some performance stuffers that taint the overall experience.
As for the PC experience, my co-op partner, Analog Stick Gaming’s very own Jordan Andow, played a few hours with me via his impressive rig powered by an Nvidia 5090 GPU and an AMD 9950X3D CPU. The game was maintaining around 120fps with occasional noticeable dips, even on his variable refresh rate capable display. That being said, it’s important to keep in mind that we did have all the graphical settings maxed out while outputting with 4K resolution. Meaning that there is without a doubt lots of scalability and headroom for The Mound to perform well across a wide range of different PC hardware. If you want to see some gameplay from the PC version, you can check it out on our YouTube channel now.
When playing co-op, we tried to use proximity chat, and it caused me to have some insane audio issues when trying to comprehend what my friend was even saying. It felt like I could only understand every 4th or 5th syllable. We had to reboot our games and chat via Discord instead, preventing the game from using our audio as a hallucination. Also, we had some issues with initially connecting as the invites were just not going through.
Also, while you can play with randoms, if they are refusing to talk, you might be in for a bad time of not knowing where they go, as there are no player markers, refusing to cooperate on tasks, or even when they signal for the cart to return, let alone taking all the gear during the prep for the mission. I had a few randoms that communicated and it led to far more success than failure.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has incredible promise, but its execution seems like the team was punching well above their weight. This feels like something that should have been in early access or development for a few more months, not to mention a proper pass for console optimization. Still, what is here is interesting, and the sanity effects will certainly keep this game in the conversation, but more has to be added to keep those expeditions fresh and engaging. It may have moments of intense fun, especially with friends, but without a solid sense of progression, it’s hard to say if this expedition is worth its reward.
Developer - ACE Team.
Publisher - NACON.
Released - July 15th, 2026.
Available On - Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC.
Rated - (M) - Blood, Gore, Violence.
Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X/S.
Review Access - A review code for The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.