In This Co-Op Horror Game, What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You, Actually

Co-op horror games are very in right now, so it may be that the best way to stand out is to do something unlike the rest of the crowd. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has found its hook. In this four-player Lovecraftian horror game, you and up to three others will embark on missions into a forest of cosmic horrors, where you'll try to collect loot and escape with your life intact. While it sounds a lot like Lethal Company, it ultimately doesn't fit neatly in that bucket alongside so many other copycats.

For one, it's quite pretty. Foregoing the popular aesthetic often referred to as "friendslop," The Mound goes for a more detailed, photorealistic look, which shines best in its environments. Despite being full of zombie-like creatures, giant insects, and birds who behave as harbingers of doom, the forest is really nice to look at. It's quite an achievement from the relatively small studio, Ace Team.

But the differences go beyond looks, too, and the biggest difference is The Mound's novel hallucination mechanic. Each of the four players in a group can suffer their own bad trip. The forest feels alive and reacts to your progress, toying with your mind the deeper you go, and the longer you take to turn back to safety. You'll sometimes see things that aren't there, or even not see things that are there. 

As one really clever application of this idea, you'll sometimes be tripping so badly that you'll see your allied adventurers as monsters, which isn't so bad if your group is alone and you have a moment to sort through the illusion. But in a chaotic moment, it's all too easy to swipe your sword at a friend because they looked like a ghoul and you had no time to ask questions.

In my hour-long preview, I got to see how, though The Mound is presented in first-person, and you do sometimes have guns, it's far from a first-person shooter. That's because the noise you make awakens the forest and sends more threats your way, so shooting at all is a last resort, both because of this desperate need to keep quiet and also because guns are purposely slow and have very limited ammo anyway.

In an interesting change-up to the usual Lethal Company formula, levels are not procedurally generated. Instead, they behave more like those in Left 4 Dead, where they are largely the same from round to round, but some smaller things change, and of course, the location and behaviors of enemies can't reliably be predicted, to keep things fresh. The developers told me this was a conscious choice because they want to find a balance between keeping players from completely learning the maps while still giving them some sense of feeling lost in the woods.

This is because collecting loot isn't the only objective. There are also story-related items you'll be able to find to open up more of the story and unlock new maps, some of which take you away from the woods (though not the hallucinations). You don't have to go this far in any given round, and sometimes it'll be best not to, because chasing down these items means more time for the woods to grow more sinister, eventually hurtling boss monsters at you, some of which must only be avoided and can't be defeated. 

From my limited preview, The Mound's best feature is how bewildering the "rules" of the world are. Not knowing what a particular fungus will do when I eat it, not knowing exactly how hallucinations work--what they can and can't show me or hide from me--never quite being sure that what I'm seeing is there and real for my allies, too, makes it all an exciting, psychedelic trip. There are a few things I saw in my demo that I don't even want to spoil here, because they offered such horrific implications for the world the game is set in. 

I was glad to hear the team behind The Mound doesn't plan to explain much of the forest's rules in the run-up to the game's July launch. The plan is to let players hop in and try to piece things together for themselves, both as a foursome per round and as a wider community on forums like Reddit and Discord, like one big, shared drug trip where the comedown could cost you everything.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is due out July 15 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.