The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review: Lovecraftian Extraction at Its Best?
Aboard a creaking galleon, a sketchy pirate drops you right into the dark heart of a cursed, Lovecraftian jungle. Specifically, you and your crew must launch expeditions from your rowboat, hunting for buried gold and occult relics to earn your keep. However, the deep, suffocating forest is actively fighting back, playing tricks on your mind and twisting your perception until you cannot even trust your own teammates. It is a brilliant, tense, first-person setup that immediately grabs you by the throat, although the actual execution on consoles is a far bumpier ride.
Specs & HUD | Gameplay | Performance | Settings |
Developer: ACE Team | Publisher: Nacon | Buy: Xbox Store
- Download Size: 24GB (Xbox Series S), 23.12GB (Xbox PC)
- Playstyle: First-person extraction horror & Action RPG
- Cross-play: Fully supported (with toggle)
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review Xbox – Specs & HUD
- The game offers a clean, atmospheric 3D world viewed entirely through a tight, tense first-person perspective.
- A handy UI button displays how much money you have on you, clearly breaking down your gold holdings between yourself, your team, and the Ox and of course your progress towards the goal amount.
- The on-screen HUD features several toggles to clear up your view, including adjustments for inventory opacity, auto-hiding the inventory, and auto-hiding your health bar.
- A central centre dot toggle can be enabled on the HUD to help reduce motion sickness during chaotic, dark treks, and despite this, you still don’t have a dot to help with the shooting of guns, crossbows, and bows, which is annoying, but you know realism gonna get you.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Xbox Review – Gameplay
Your home base is a massive galleon where you can freely wander around, pet the dog on deck (who is a very good boy) and even ask the local lute player to play you a song while you unlock new tunes. Before you head out on an expedition, you pick a mission on the ship and row a tiny boat to shore, but you have to earn your keep by hunting deer, collecting resources, and finding gold idols to hit a set quota. These runs force you to adapt because your starting gear is randomised, meaning you might have axes and armour one minute and a bow with a few bandages the next. Once you hit the dirt, Father Escalona drives an Ox and cart that follows you around so you can deposit items, firewood, and rescued survivors into the chest, but the old man is a massive pain in the backside. He constantly chats about being scared of things he saw, and because you cannot tell the cart to stop or follow manually, he will confidently wheel his way into busy areas and make a mess of things while you are trying to stay quiet.
Specifically, stealth and noise play a massive part in whether you survive the jungle. Noise markers are not clear at all, but everything you do makes a racket, so you better start cutting branches instead of breaking through them, and swap your guns for a quiet bow. If you make too much noise, you will anger the wildlife and alert some god-awful forest creatures that you really do not want to meet. Compounding this is the constant dread of isolation; the longer you wander away from your team, the cart, or the rowboat, the more prone you are to absolute horror. Your sanity slips, paranoia kicks in, and you will start seeing things blinking away in the dark or hearing footsteps behind you. It gets so twisted that your teammate will suddenly look like a literal monster, and if you panic and shoot them, you will actually kill your real-life buddy as they shift back into human form right in front of your eyes.
When you do get grabbed by an enemy, they will drag you in with their tentacles, leaving you frantically hacking at them with whatever melee weapon you have on hand. It is a fantastic, high-tension system, but unless I am just incredibly unlucky, the layout of the enemies, items, and gear is exactly the same on almost every single run, turning a scary trek into a repetitive slog. Even worse, the game has some brilliant ideas but absolutely refuses to teach you how they work. Instead of a proper tutorial, you get button prompts and a manual guidebook you have to stop and read, which is a great way to get killed in a stealth horror game. If you die, you just magically respawn back on the boat with zero fanfare or text explaining what went wrong, leaving you in a constant, gritty tug-of-war where you desperately want to love the atmosphere, but the repetitive grind and slow progression keep pushing you away. They do, however, absolutely nail the Lovecraftian atmosphere and effects, and it is the real highlight here.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Xbox Review – Performance
- The PC version runs incredibly well with minor, occasional stuttering after adjusting a few of the granular graphics settings.
- Specifically, the Xbox Series S version runs very poorly, suffering from heavy slowdown, persistent asset pop-in, and rough, unstable framerates.
- Hard crashes happened multiple times on the Xbox Series S build, almost always triggered when heavy rain weather effects started up. I had the usual issues on the PC Xbox version, but I had enough settings that I could fix it there.
- Character animations feel stiff and lifeless, with NPCs showing zero reaction to the nightmarish cosmic horrors happening right in front of them. They just never convey the dread; the voice work will give some clue, but it’s not enough.
- If you get knocked down in single-player, the camera shifts to a third-person view; you cannot move, but you can move the camera around. Sometimes you can become corrupted, which you don’t control but you can only watch as you take out your teammates and stalk them, occasionally causing a game-breaking standoff bug where no one can move.
- Solo progression is painfully slow compared to playing in a full, four-player co-op squad, making offline play a massive, repetitive grind; it is still fun though, if you cannot guess by now I am conflicted.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Xbox Review – Settings
- Controller support is fully implemented across both platforms, offering four distinct control presets, sensitivity sliders, and axis inversion. You can also use the mouse and keyboard on the PC Xbox version, and the Xbox Series S version does show a mouse smoothing slider.
- Unfortunately, you cannot completely remap your buttons on a controller, which is a massive disappointment for custom setups.
- Camera settings are surprisingly robust, letting you tweak camera roll intensity, motion blur, camera shakes, and camera smoothing.
- PC players get deep visual settings, including scaling options, DLSS quality, V-sync, view distance, lighting quality, and Nvidia Reflex.
- The settings menu inexplicably includes a mouse smoothing slider on the console build, which is a bizarre addition for a controller.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Xbox Review
Summary
What Makes The Mound Omen of Cthulhu Worth Playing?
The atmosphere in this first-person horror trek is incredibly thick, constantly keeping you on edge as you navigate the dark, foggy woods. Specifically, the dynamic sanity system is brilliant, forcing you to balance your isolation by staying close to your trusty Ox cart or eating strange mushrooms to keep the terrifying hallucinations away. In addition, the game forces you to adapt by giving you specific gear loadouts for different expeditions, meaning you might have to swap your trusty bow for a heavy axe on a whim. The tension of managing your noise levels to avoid alerting sleeping beasts, coupled with some of the most satisfying tree-chopping mechanics seen in a game, makes exploring these massive, secret-filled zones genuinely engaging when you are playing with a full squad of friends.
The Biggest Frustrations In The Mound Omen of Cthulhu
Trying to tackle this cosmic nightmare alone is a tedious chore that highlights the game’s worst flaws. For instance, the offline progression is incredibly slow, and the AI buddy you can toggle on is barely reliable for anything other than basic resource gathering. The cart driven by Father Escalona is a constant source of irritation because you cannot command him to stop or follow, leading to situations where he blindly rolls into hostile territory while blabbing away. But you need him nearby to store treasure. In addition, the Xbox Series S version is in a rough state, plagued by constant frame rate drops, ugly texture pop-in, and hard crashes that reliably hit whenever the rain starts falling.
The Mound Omen of Cthulhu Overall Verdict: Is It Worth Playing?
The Mound has a brilliant, terrifying heart buried under a mountain of repetitive mission structures, terrible Xbox Series S performance, and painfully slow solo progression that makes it hard to recommend the Xbox Series S version. But that said, I leave it as I still think about the game when I am not playing it; I enjoy myself a lot when playing it, but it does have issues, and I am hoping they get ironed out.
