Customer Reviews

Cursed Mountain Wii

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wasn't sure what to expect when I got this, but I'm now thoroughly impressed. Things started out slow, but creepy, and only continue to ratchet up from there. The setting is so perfect for a horror game that, in hindsight, it's really shocking that no one has thought to set a survival horror game in this setting before.

I've been playing this about 2hours a day for the last three days and it's one of the few games in recent memory that I hate to put down. It's a real page turner.

Impressive graphics for the Wii and sensible use of the Wii's unique controls, with a great spooky setting and an engaging story earns this 5 stars in my book.

Cursed Mountain is one of the better games you'll find on the Wii, a console that is plagued with shovel ware. The game's setting is fairly unique on the console with a lot of care obviously given to the design. The game also does a good job creating that eerie, solitary atmosphere.

The game play, however, consists mostly of going from one set of empty rooms to another set of empty rooms looking for items, so it gets rather repetitive. Fighting ghosts requires motion gestures, which can get very frustrating -- especially as the game progresses, since more and more gestures have to be chained together. The game wisely narrows the gestures down to a simple set of four, but recognition of the thrusting motion is rather iffy, and I found myself often having to attempt a gesture combo over and over.

There is a handful of boss fights that present fun challenges, and there's enough story to move the game forward, with some mature themes thrown in further on in the game for good measure. The game locked up on me several times, but there are plenty of checkpoints in the game, so that is not a huge issue. You will occasionally have to sit through some cut-scenes or repeat some basic activity before retrying after a checkpoint, though.

If you enjoy the horror genre, Cursed Mountain has enough polish that I'd recommend giving it a chance.

I'm glad that I overcame my initial hesitancy to buy Cursed Mountain, because the past several days I've found myself unable to do much else besides play this game. There are several challenges that the mountain gave which were quite enjoyable, and some intense battles with ghosts and demons. The creators did a solid job integrating the Wii remote into the game, and made use of the speaker in a fun way. Throughout the game you do have to combine different movements during combat which initially caused problems. Often the game/sensor bar would not pick up the gestures, and it was not until the end that I seemed to find the correct rhythm/ movement needed. The M rating seems a bit of a stretch, but there was a very brief moment that brought in an adult theme. If you are looking for blood and gore, this is not the game for you. Something to also keep in mind is that it is a short game (it took me about 15 hrs.) and so far there does not seem to be much replay value (no change in gameplay/ extras/ etc. ). The positives far outweigh those aspects though. The storyline made it hard to walk away, and I have to say I love how they utilized the spooky side of Buddhism. Overall Cursed Mountain ranks up there with my favorite Wii games.

I am standing in a barely light room looking at the ancient Buddhist murals that seem to dance in the flickering light from the candles on the prayer table. In the background, I can hear the wind howling outside - mixed with the noises of the burning candles, slamming shutters, and... voices that are either chanting for my death or moaning in pain. After taking a few seconds to enjoy the eeriness and atmosphere (and being prodded by the on screen character ("Tea break is over, Eric", he says is a nice crisp British accent)), I slowly move on to the next room with dread and a sense of unease. After all, I originally broke the magic seal on this house as I could hear a woman inside sobbing and pleading for help. No one was there of course and instead I find myself once again all alone in an abandoned house in an abandoned town located 18,000 feet in the Himalayans.

Welcome to Cursed Mountain, where you will have to explore realistic locations set in the Himalayans to find your lost brother. The "finding a lost relative" hook has been run into the ground - but this game is one of the more original concepts to come to the Wii. The story and game play are well executed and create a fun but extremely eerie game. Every aspect of this game is intelligent and therefore never insults your intelligence. There are no "Yeah, right" moments.

The real star of the game is of course is the atmosphere created by the sights and sounds of the game. This is a game best played slowly - enjoying every little detail - in total dark (Party game this is not!) Honestly the background noises are the best executed noises I have ever heard in a game - and it is all done by incidental noises and not by music; explosions; etc. At one point, I realized that the sounds I thought were my footsteps weren't when the noises continue after I stopped walking. The fact I turned around with dread is credit to the programmers.

The voice work is great but is sometimes hard to understand as the voices either have accents; are whispering; or are drowned out by the background noises. I HIGHLY suggest using the option to have subtitles from the start. I did not realize subtitles were available until I was 4 hours into the game. I actually restarted as I kept missing key pieces of the game (spirits that I thought were just mumbling or chanting were actually saying things).

While not everything is interactive, the details included in the towns are amazing. You can look up during most of the game and see the summit (where logic tells you is where your brother is). The only issue I saw with the graphics is that the smoke / mist that seem to envelop everything becomes pixilated sometimes - not a big deal though. The characters move smoothly (and for those who complain about the slow movement of the characters - you are playing in a location 3 miles above sea level with low oxygen - if Eric sprinted around the town, it would actually distract from the realism).

Gameplay does take place in dark areas for affect. To its credit, the game does allow you to adjust the brightness by pressing the "1" button on the remote. I found that I did need to occasionally adjust the brightness - usually I explored a room in the normal darkness but then went back to explore again with a little more light (and did find things that originally appeared to be shadows).

I do have to subtract 1 start for the game's controls and camera control. When combat begins (which is done with mythical items and gestures and not with an AK-47 that just happened to be lying around), the camera angle switches to a first person view. You will quickly learn how to flick the nunchuk control to correct any bad camera angles. You "fight" by placing a cursor on the spirit of the tortured monk or Sherpa. The problem is that it is not uncommon for the cursor not to appear. You will spend too many precious seconds flinging around the Wiimote to find the cursor - sometimes with it never appearing. Friendly suggestion #3 is to press the "C" button to activate the third eye before entering a new area or starting combat. You can then center the cursor on the screen. Then when you fight, do not move the Wiimote - instead use the stick on the nunchuk to move your character. This helps in almost all cases except where the ghost appears via a long cut scene. I agree that it is frustrating to die not from being surprised by a spirit but from not being able to waggle the remote fast enough to find the cursor.

For $20 - seriously!!! Please do yourself a favor and get this game. Yes there are some control issues but the gameplay offsets this problem. I am so surprised that this game is not selling more copies. For those who complain about the shovelware problem of the Wii, please support original and intelligent games like Cursed Mountain.

I have been playing this in the middle of the night when the family goes to bed with some candles lit and the lights off. The experience is akin to reading a book with a vague but enticing plot with motion controls and CSTICK exploration. The attention to accuracy is exceptional and the sense of isolation and dread this game invokes in the right environment is downright creepy. Wii graphics have rarely looked better particularly the climbing scnes and a big plus for me is the excellent sound design throughout. The controls are not broken nor butter smooth just functional and implemented to push you down a fairly linear story that dodges, and weaves, and satisfies. I am surprised to find a game like this on the Wii as the market for titles with this much reading, factual history, and introspection required of its participants is almost microscopic. Give it a chance you might like it we need more like Cursed Mountain on every system anyway.

I would recommend this game to anyone who has a Wii. I've played to the eighth level and love it so far. It has a great story which develops through the game and a unique way of using the controllers. The game is full of suspense and surprises and keeps me on the edge of my seat. I have not seen another game like it on the Wii.

I watched this game for some time, finally getting it when it hit the bargain bins. Kind of wish I had got it sooner, actually. There's some neat stuff going on here that make this worth at least a rental. Or a bargain bin purchase, as previously stated.

I have read a few reviews on this game, and yes, the controls pretty much whomp (technical term). Turning around to get that pesky ghost/monster that gets behind you is entirely too slow and requires you to run full tilt the other direction then spin around oh-so-agonizingly-slow. The aiming is twitchy as well. I had a better chance hitting my tv with the controller then hitting ghosts in some areas with the "spirit rifle" technique they give you. That will really deter a number of people from this game, no doubt.

Let me immediately followup by saying that because the game saves automatically at checkpoints every...oh I don't know...3.5 minutes, you will find yourself back-tracking very little, and usually conquering whatever the challenge was with ease. EVERY time I have died in this game, I have come back and beat the part in half the time with twice the health. You learn how to strategize a bit to target and snipe the ghosties quite effectively. I like the closed areas the best, as you can fire wildly and almost always get a hit. Very satisfying.

The graphics are well handled, albeit a little rough around the edges. The fog effects in this game do exactly what they are supposed to do-blind you. When you activate the spirit shotgun technique, particle and ash effects cover the screen, reflecting that you in the spirit world. Pretty neat. One nice touch is that while in this mode, the sky turns black. Also, when you go out of spirit sight mode, the particle effect lingers for about a half second. Again, neat stuff. Areas are very tightly woven together, reflecting that you are wandering around a dangerous mountain, and finding nooks and crannies in all that seems rewarding.

The cut scenes are imagistic snapshots with moving parts, kind of like a comic book. Because of the hallucinogenic quality of the story itself-our hero isn't quite sure what is real and what isn't-it works pretty well. It is obvious they were on a budget-these things happen.

All in all, not a hard game, not a speed run. I enjoyed it thoroughly, all issues aside. It's also neat to see a game using a Tibetan (I hope I am right here) background and aesthetic. That's new. A well-spent Saturday afternoon with what appears to be a made-for-SciFy-Channel movie. One of the better ones. Not Rock Monster.

I have finally given up on Cursed Mountain. Not because it is too hard, because it isn't. Not because it has a terrible story, because the story isn't bad. It's the controls, and boy did the controls break this game. I don't know how far I am into the game, but it doesn't feel very far and I just have to give up.

PROS:
+++ Atmospheric graphics and sound
+++ Some genuinely creepy stuff
+++ Really cool concept

CONS:
--- Sluggish, unresponsive controls
--- Tedious level designs made worse by the slow and sluggish controls.
--- Very low resolution graphics. Looks good on a low-end TV but on my hi-def TV the textures are blurry and blocky.

GAMEPLAY: You play a mountain climber that must find his brother that disappeared on a mountain deep in Asia. Essentially, this is a survival horror title, and it has much in common, good and bad, with other games in the genre. Go around, smash pots, find glowing items to pick up, kill ghosts with you magical ice axe, use your third eye to see ghosts and blast them with your ice axe, and use wii-waggle gestures to break seals/spells. Somehow this should all work, but the gameplay does not feel polished enough. The game started to feel tedious very quickly, but I think the biggest issue is how the controls and gameplay intersect. The lack of level maps or exploration maps also annoyed me.

GRAPHICS: Sometimes the graphics look great and other times you feel like you are stuck in a low-res pixelated mess. The only saving grace to this game's graphics is the fact that the developer has some talented artists who can make low-res textures fit together nicely into an atmospheric ambiance.

AUDIO: Quite good. The voice acting of the main character and the monks is forced and strained, but the ambient audio effects and music are actually done amazingly well. Definitely the most polished aspect of the game.

CONTROLS: Sluggish and unresponsive. The old Resident Evil games feel more responsive than this game. I can walk faster than the main character can run, which makes no sense because the main character is professional mountain climber. Mountain climbers are nimble and strong. This guy feels like someone nailed his feet to the floor. The climbing sequences feel bland. The camera isn't bad but it isn't very good either. Combat is fairly uninspired and the collision detection for attacks makes no sense. Sometimes I manage to hit targets that I obviously missed while other times attacks seem to pass through without effect. I might as well flip a coin.

VALUE: I couldn't stand to play any more after only a few hours, so I don't rate the value of this title very high. I understand the game is fairly short based off of other reviews that I have read.

I was really looking forward to this game, but now that I've had a chance to play it I am pretty disappointed. I feel like the game wasn't quite finished, rushed out the door before the proper level of polish could be applied. I really hope to see this developer create another game, but I just hope they do a better job of it before putting the game out for sale.

Cursed mountain is a very well illustrated game that conveys the sense of being in an isolated and virtually abandoned Tibetan mountain village that has fallen under some kind of evil curse. I like the use of references to Tibetan culture and hope that more game designers began to work to bring more of these exotic cultures to life. I think the game could have benefited from using more of the rituals, for instance the Tibetan death ceremonies in the storyline and relying less on a "seek objects and do battle" format. Just walking around this local is interesting, until you have to do battle with the ghosts who have taken over the town.

As good as the Wii can be at some things, I find that combat is not always one of them.These battles involve coordinating several remote actions. Once you have added a spiritual component to your pick axe, (which happens very early in the game) you have to manipulate both the remote and the nunchuk in order to successfully combat the phantoms. The C button on the nunchuk must be depressed so that you can use your third eye and activate your spirit weapon. The B button on the Wii remote is pressed to fire your weapon and the A button must be held down to do rituals which involve moving the remote and/or nunchuk in specific ways to dispel the ghost once it is wounded.

This would be great if the Wii remote worked better. Finding the cursor (as you probably know from playing other games),especially with hungry ghosts bearing down, can be as challenging as aiming it. At other times your are able to aim it, but nothing happens in the game. The movements needed to completely dispel the ghosts are complicated and it is very hard to know whether you are doing them wrong or if the remote is just not fully conveying them. I found what works best is a frenzy of heavy shaking in all directions (including a strong wrist snap forward since this is the remote/nunchuk's weakest direction).

Seeing during combat is another issue. You are always following your character rather than seeing through their eyes. The + control pad is supposed to change to first person, but it doesn't do much and can not be used with the third eye in battle. The minute the third eye is activated your movement is also curtailed. When the attacker is close, you often find yourself blocking your own view of combat and looking at your back. Moving to the side makes it very hard to aim your weapon correctly.

Perhaps my least favorite thing about the game is that you are forced to submit to the auto-save feature. I hate games that make you replay major sequences over and over. To me that is boring, and very frustrating when you are forced to repeat major battle scenes.

As Wii games go, Cursed Mountain is a very good looking game, with excellent graphics and sound. It is reasonably enjoyable even with the flaws. Exploring the exotic locals and learning about Tibetan culture are interesting enough to make this worth playing.

I'll start by saying that I liked this game enough to play through it all the way, though for the last third of the game I did feel a bit like "is it over yet?!" The concept is great, the voice acting is really good for the budget I'm sure they had, and the experience does feel a bit like (perhaps) what it would feel to climb a mountain, which is what they were going for. That said, the tediousness and repetitiveness of climbing a mountain are also present. The enemies are all kinda the same, and it isn't that fun to kill them after a while, even with the weapon upgrades you get. I gave the game 4 stars because at least they tried to do something different, and I'm glad I played the game. That said I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to a friend. If you play a ton of Wii games and are running out of options or looking for something you won't find in another game, this is definitely worth a play-through, but if you're like me and only play one a month or so, there are probably better options. The last two games I played were Resident Evil 4 and Kirby's Epic Yarn, both of which blew this gaming experience out of the water. The price is right though, can't complain about a $10 game.