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I'm a longtime fan of horror games, I'm talking from Alone in the Dark back in the days when the Apple II was considered the hottest computer around. I've played Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Fatal Frame and almost every horror series you can imagine off the top of your head and, just when I thought I'd seen it all, Cursed Mountain comes along and gives me a few fresh surprises.
While not necessarily a revolution in horror gaming, Cursed Mountain has the benefit of being the only horror game I can recall playing that centers around fundamental Buddhism and the culture of small settlements in the mountains of Tibet, providing a whole new, unique premise that the game, quite honestly, does very well in utilizing to its fullest. The atmosphere of the small villages are creepy, yet comforting. The occasional ring of chimes and ceremonial bells in an otherwise abandoned town establish the first section of the game, providing background noise hat sounds authentic to the region. The use of Buddhist gods, prayers, rituals and religious structures add a wealth of culture to the design, making it a slightly educational experience at times for people who don't know much (if anything) about the region's culture.
In regard to the horror element, Cursed Mountain bases its fear on, you guessed it: curses. Specifically, a curse that has led the area around a sacred mountain desolate of all life and, as a climber looking for his brother, you'll get sucked into this mess. Ghosts are the main enemies in the game and, I have to say, this is where the game kind of falls flat for me. While the use of ghosts is true to the overall cultured setup of the game's story, the way ghosts are utilized are not very diverse.
In the beginning of the game, you have these strange instances of the camera tilting and the color washing out, which you discover a quick moment later to be the presence of a spirit. The game taunts you with this at first, giving you flashes of the spirits as they walk by, stringing you along before you reach the destination the game wants you to go to. From then on, for the most part, ghosts are utilized in the same way zombies are in the later Resident Evil games: they move slowly, some slightly faster than others, and you have to either shoot (with spiritual energy) or bash them until they're gone. This was particularly disappointing to someone who has played the Fatal Frame series, in which ghosts crept around and created these illusions or distant noises before even coming close to the player character. Encounters with ghosts past the first couple hours of the game are just abrupt, rarely being set up by anything or leading you to the location of the fight by anything other than "here is the only way you can go."
On the subject of combat, and really control in general, the default mouse sensitivity is incredibly high, leading me to whip around just to do a single turn. I was forced to go to the options menu and turn the sensitivity almost all the way down, but at least that fixed it, so it ceased to be an issue. However, movement in regards to the camera is a little bit wonky and wreaks of early-2000s horror control schemes. Basically, the player doesn't move in the old-timey Resident Evil Tank controls, but rather moves normally. However, the camera will randomly shift to a fixed angle (instead of the player-controlled norm) and will force you to get your bearings on the controls once again if you let go of the key you had held down. Basically, this is trying to combine early horror game cinematography with early-2000s horror game controls, and this leads to annoying instances of bumping up against a wall or getting slowed down by not being able to walk a straight line and instead zig-zag until you can figure out the right alignment. However, these instances are relatively sparse and only happen once in the area they occur, meaning that it usually doesn't happen during instances where you need to backtrack.
The voice acting is...well, all over the place in terms of quality. The people who did the voice acting for English-speaking characters did their job well, though the main character tends to mumble sometimes during cutscenes, but at least never when important information is being conveyed. However, the characters who are non-native English speakers (monks, for example) tend to use this bastardized form of Yodaspeak which seems slightly stereotypical, but doesn't make it difficult to understand what they're trying to say.
Graphically, the game is okay. I assume there were no differences from the Wii version, so I guess I could describe it best as a higher-end Playstation 2 game. I didn't run into any graphical glitches and I only ran into some lagging issues about once or twice, meaning that lag wasn't an issue at all. The textures are kind of lazily put together on a few things (some dead bodies, mountain terrain at times), but nothing that's going to stick out like a sore thumb.
In terms of sound, this is easily the greatest thing the game has going for it; even the main menu screen's ambient chanting started to creep me out quite well. The background music for much of the game (outside combat) is slow and creeping in the fashion of Silent Hill (though more relying on conventional instruments) and the little sounds of inanimate objects being disturbed by the intense mountain wind makes traversing through settlements a particularly unnerving experience. The battle music consists of loud Tibetan drums and chanting, making some of the more intense combat situations quite intense. In fact, I wouldn't mind having the soundtrack just to play during Halloween. Oh, and remember to wear headphones when playing, the game really does a great job of moving sounds from ear-to-ear and it's the best way to capture it.
OVERALL:
GOOD
+Unique premise brimming with culture (you might even learn something about Buddhism!)
+Wonderful, creepy soundtrack and sound design
+Beginning hours are tense and unnerving
+Very engaging story that makes you want to know what happens next
+Runs well with few graphical glitches
BAD
-Camera doesn't work well with the control all the time
-Combat gets stale every now and then
-Voice acting quality dips for certain characters
Score: 4/5
Definitely worth the $5 if you want to try something new in the horror genre.
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