Mundaun stands out, Mundaun inspires: The scary game fascinates in the test with its unusual setting, the remote alpine pastures in the Swiss mountains. The hand-drawn black-and-white graphics and the dramatic story about a curse, alpine ghouls, and a talking goat's head already make the thoughtful horror adventure one of the surprises of the 2021 gaming year.
This game starts oddly enough: Curdin, the game's protagonist, returns by bus to the remote Swiss village of Mundaun - a rough-hewn, rugged black-and-white mountain world that won't let him go for the next few days, and me for the next good ten hours. He spent part of his childhood in this seclusion with his grandfather, and now a sad occasion calls him back there: during the bus ride, he reads aloud the letter that prompted him to travel back in time - the village priest has written to tell him that his grandpa has died. An unusual voice-over flanks the written texts and subtitled dialogues in the game: namely, it is in Romansh (also known as Bündnerromanisch or Romontsch), the fourth official national language of Switzerland, which is spoken by only about 60,000 people. It gives the title, similar to its unusual appearance, its very own original atmosphere, which contributes a lot to how you feel like a player in Mundaun.
After the character gets off the bus, you walk across the monochrome grassy hills in the first-person view - there's a burnt barn on the left, and on the right, you go down the slope to a distant chapel. Sure, the graphics are crude and far from the state-of-the-art in terms of modeling, but the textures hand-drawn by developer Michel Ziegler and then glued to the objects on the computer give Mundaun a very distinctive, appealing look.
The main character, Curdin, quickly realizes that all is not right up here in the mountains: he finds the charred corpse of his grandfather in a burned barn, while the open grave in the cemetery is empty - and yet the priest wants him to know that the dead man was buried long ago. The whole thing is very strange!
Little by little, a not-so-small world full of quaint places and little game mechanics opens up.
Conclusion
The fairy tale about the pact with the devil is not radically new, but it is told in such an unspent and exciting way. I gradually discover more dark places in the alpine world, wander through caves and bunkers, get pulled into dark dreams, or meet crazy inhabitants. Walkie-talkie conversations with soldiers from an old war, a nighttime toboggan race, the ghostly beekeepers at the glassy mountain lake - the Swiss indie game offers unique, exciting, and quaint experiences.
