Cursed Mountain

It’s Eurojank Resident Evil 4 for sure, but given the near immediate shift away from that particular third-person shooter paradigm in the post-Gears era, it’s sweet to see a lesser-known game attempt the style. Not that it holds a candle to its predecessor; you can’t move while shooting, but you also don’t have ammo to worry about for your paltry assortment of mystic weapons, and the vast majority of encounters throw one or two enemies at you with no confounding factors beyond that. Still, the game has merit on its environmental design alone, trapping the player in vicious sheets of ice and gusts of oxygen-starved wind in a rare mountaineering horror concept. The start is slow while protagonist Eric Simmons explores evacuated Tibetan monasteries at lower altitudes, but by the second half the barren slopes of Chomo Lonzo envelop the player in blinding whiteness and sullen caverns. The mountain’s name translates to “bird goddess,” and as it lashes out as you it deploys decaying avian forms that judder and blink as they pursue you. Few horror games visually capture suffocation like this.

Was pleasantly surprised by the story (penned by Infocom stalwart Bob Bates) and its depiction of arrogant western climbers trampling over native Tibetan customs. The monks are studious and autonomous; they’re composed and capable of high-altitude climbing yet jeered at by the westerners, who naively attempt to fast-track the necessary rituals in order to scale the mountain. Those same monks push the other climbers forward in an dangerous attempt to fulfill the recovery of a terma, a treasure containing spiritual knowledge hidden as a time capsule. This push-and-pull provides depth to what could have been a much more stereotypical narrative of climbers overdoing it in the pursuit of glory. Likewise Eric, a grim, teeth-gritting climber with world renown, searches for his younger brother Frank, who has based his entire trek around surpassing his brother’s reputation and getting out from under his smothering, condescending nature. In pursuit of this, Frank acts absolutely deranged towards the denizens of the mountain, going so far as physical violence, which Eric blithely brushes off as childishness by Frank. The end of the game ponders whether Eric tracks down his brother out of proper familial love or merely duty. There is deliberate, unsolved tension between each of these groups, with brief characterization through flashbacks, monk recollections, and diary scraps punctuating the otherwise solo climb. At its best, the game leaves this tension unresolved, exacerbating the ambiguity by including non-sequiturs and warping the narrative chronology such that one can’t tell what is real, a spiritual vision, or a hallucination. At its worst, it gets too clunky with its critique, such as in a surprisingly mature depiction of misogynistic violence getting flattened to a blunt metaphor for the treatment of the mountain.

The thick particle effects, hazy enemies, and claustrophobic viewing angle attempt to paper over an otherwise trite combat system. [src]

Minute-to-minute you’ll have to really lean into the sight-seeing and scares to carry the otherwise ho-hum walking and climbing experience, lugged along by loosey-goosey tank controls and an assortment of motion microgames. The same admiration of the details over the bulk makes the combat shine as well; simplicity aside, Eric’s ice-pick swing is a serious contender for best melee gamefeel among its ilk thanks to a generous ladling of hitstop. Sometimes this even bleeds into the motion gimmicks, such as the tether weapon (which instantly kills most fodder) possessing a taut snap to its movement, although the majority are regular waggling and stiff flailing. The glory kill actually gives you a good chunk of health back (there are no other resources to modulate), which led the developers to stumble into a great counter-pattern: just make a bunch of the arenas drain your health over time automatically. It mildly disincentivizes hit-and-run, but the aforementioned tether totally trivializes the implicit time limits, as it insta-kills everything for two-thirds of the game. The poor balancing plus the drab encounter design makes most combat range from a nuisance to a complete non-issue. This is despite brief flashes of competence, such as in an early boss fight cyclically healed by pillars. Destroying each pillar releases fodder into the arena once destroyed; when the boss fight makes a reappearance in the late game, they inexplicably forget these adds entirely.