Mundaun

You really can't put those words next to each other, "wholesome" and "horror", but that's exactly what Mundaun achieves. You play as Curdin, a young man who's returned to the valley of his youth in the Swiss Alps, named "Mundaun" (hey the game title!) His return isn't sadly for nostalgic purposes, his grandfather has died and now he's returning to the valley against the wishes of the valley's vicar. Curdin suspect's something is up. It's hard to talk about the game without mentioning it's gorgeous black and white, hand drawn style, it's so wonderfully unique and with the scenic mountain ranges and the black peaks of Mundaun. It open's like something out of the shinning with this french horn playing ominous tones as you ride the bus up the mountain, but something Mundaun does exceptionally well is subvert expectations.

As you arrive, you find the burned-out barn where your grandfather met his end and a mysterious painting sits on the hill side, showing the barn aflame, if you walk up to it the whole thing stretches out around you and sucks you back in time to the night of the fire. You see the burning barn and a man crying for help, you rush over to help but he grabs your hand, cursing you. As the flashback ends you awaken with a charred hand and face to face with the burn remains of your grandfather, who also appears to have been cursed. You swear to cleanse the both of them and save the valley.

It doesn't sound so wholesome at the moment, does it? Whilst you can say that Mundaun is a horror game, it's also open world with RPG elements and lots of neat little design choices that are almost endearing. When you first enter the valley you can turn your head and look up at the black twin peaks and press A and Curdin will say something about them, same with the church, you can pick up radio frequencies at locations and tune them into various radios throughout the game (I liked the church organ music for some reason), you drink coffee to reduce your fear because fear slows you down and the coffee is advertised to "give you courage". Eating bread makes you stronger (which would be amazing if true in the real world) and the only one that makes sense is reading gun manuals makes you a better shot with the rifle. You can drive a Muvel (hay gathering truck), you can pet goats, you can enter a sleigh race against a little girl, you can sit down at scenic spots and draw a map for yourself. It really just... feels wholesome. A lot of these activities are realistic to a degree, making coffee requires you to find the coffee, get some water at a pump, put it on the stove, put a log in the stove, light a fire, add the coffee to the water, and then you've got to have a cup to drink it out of because Curdin is not an animal. After all that your fear resistance increases.

And you'll need that because there are some horrors in the game. From the creepy straw men to the weird almost biblical events that take place, the man who appeared in the burnt house is no ordinary man, he may not even be a man at all. He can make his face loom across a lake and cause it rain black hail at his command. The same things that make the rustic slice of life moments in the game so endearing, make the supernatural events so weird and unnatural, it's another cultures fears. When you get attacked by the straw men, straw grows out of your skin which is so deeply unpleasant I can't put it to words, and up near the lake the beekeepers unleash their swarms of bee's at you which is another one of my personal fears. The game seems tailored for me to both love it and hate it.

But it has a magical quality, it balances all these things really well with a captivating story, some really amazing visuals and music and its endearing moments and disturbing content never cancel each other out. Mundaun... is magic. 5 stars, would eat all the bread again.