They Made Cthulhu An Extraction With Some Shooting

DEVELOPER:
ACE Team

GENRE:
ACTION-ADVENTURE

PLATFORM:
PC,PS5,XBOX X/S

RELEASE DATE:
15 Jul, 2026

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a co-op, horror, and apparently an extraction shooter? An interesting evolution path
for the extraction genre, and one that makes some sense to me considering
the high-stakes nature of it. Set in the Lovecraftian world of Cthulhu, a strong setting for eldritch horror. Made by indie studio ACE Team, a Latin American team, the team has just the right background for the game’s South American wilderness setting.

The Mound advertises an alluring experience decorated with confusion
and bleakness. With Nacon as their publisher, the game has potential
to be something new or unique in
the gaming market.

GAMEPLAY

PERFORMANCE

LORE

VISUALS

Storytelling Isn't Their Strong Point

Might as well not be there!

The game wastes no time on narrative well almost. You have the option of a prologue that provides almost no value, other than making the game look broken with some
odd camera positioning, animations and maybe graphical choices? I really do not know if some things were intentional or
just broken. For the rest of our game,
story was fed through journal entries that
are listened to like voice notes. Narrative is something you have to go out of your way
to follow, which is fine since not all players will care about it, but I have never felt like following it would add any value either.

The game convinces you that you will just not know things and always be confused,
and not in the good way like Karma: The Dark World does for example. It didn’t engage me with its lore and world in a
way that builds interest, and just left
me perplexed.

There Was So Much Potential

Social Experience Game

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a game best enjoyed with friends. It has all the bones for the skeleton of a social experience kind of game, and that’s when it is at its best. You
and three other players, or one bot if solo, will be taking on contracts that most of
the time require you to loot enough items
to meet a certain minimum value quota. Each game will take place on one of eighteen available maps to unlock and choose from. Your team is given a predetermined selection of equipment based on your contract to use and ration among yourselves for the best chance.

When you set off into the jungle a lot can go wrong, and you have to figure out why or how to stop what went wrong on your own. Things often escalate very quickly ending
up in a lost mission because too many enemies have swarmed you.

Much Much Missed Potential

Fun Could Be Had, at First

It is a cycle that gets repetitive quickly when solo, and frustrating with friends. The first few times you experience something, however, are a great time with friends.
When a friend appears to be an enemy in front of you because you are hallucinating and you try to shoot them with a rifle you found, but then the rifle actually turns out
to be just a stick and your friend is fighting
a copy of you made by the forest

which was awakened because someone made too much noise walking, then suddenly everything turns red because it is a blood moon or something. Those are the moments when the game is fun, for the first few times, after that everything starts blending together to the point that everything feels like it was done a hundred times before. Not to mention how sluggish and awkward the game feels at times.

The Mound of Performance Issues

Really feels unfinished

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is riddled with performance issues. Thankfully, it has improved a lot with an update that was pushed while we were reviewing
the game, however, it still is not optimal. Graphically it is fine, but animations
and camera movement could use a few improvements. For example, when an enemy tackles you it will push your camera into a third person perspective animation every single time, and that could cause motion sickness for some players.

And the overall UI of the game could really use a paint job, it just feels like
the absolute bare minimum to just function despite having space to do much more.

An Example of Underdelivering

Maybe at Some Point In Time

This is a tough one to recommend. It does something somewhat niche and unique;
but the execution is lackluster to say the least. The game feels like an unfinished build,
yet to be refined and ironed out. The story, well, there’s really nothing to say there; it is somewhere. Gameplay is fun only if you have friends to play with while things still feel new. Solo is frustrating with an AI companion that doesn’t know how to play the game sometimes.

It is a game that I really want to enjoy but it just doesn’t give me that experience. I would say wait for a few weeks or months until they finish fixing the game and maybe add some things, but by then it might no longer have a surviving community.