At the Mountains of Madness is a horror game that will put you in the shoes of Professor Dyer, a geologist from the University of Miskatonic, who will be in charge of an expedition team in Antarctica in 1930. The game is meant to be horror type psychological with a lot of influences Lovecraft, famous writer of horror novels, so this is not a Dead Space where you have to face your enemies directly, but rather the horror is in the atmosphere and survival .
Note that this is only an alpha and a lot can still be subject to change!
The game starts with the logo of Unreal Engine 4 with which the game is developed, and follows the main menu which announces the color: tentacles! It reminds me of things I don't want to talk about here ... Anyway, let's continue ...
I am starting in a port, I have probably just docked for the start of my adventure. Slightly further, I see a fisherman. Speaking to him, he goes away without saying a word, I follow him, which brings me to other people who react the same way when I want to address them. They are in fact heading towards a boat which will put itself after a while by activating (very) regularly its siren, indicating the imminent departure. I embark and find the captain who finally makes us leave for Antarctica!
Once there, my first mission will be to reach the camp and find equipment, including flashlight and rope. I will quickly notice one of the game's first challenges: the cold. As I open the inventory, I see the image of my character gradually becoming covered in blue, and my vision will soon seem to freeze, I will luckily find a campfire to warm me up quickly. Ah, and you have to avoid walking in it ... No, I haven't tried ...
In short, I take a tour of the camp, pick up everything I need, find everything I need, and I go to the cave that I had seen in the distance. I quickly come across a large rock with TNT marked on it, I'm guessing I need to use the stick of dynamite I found earlier. It works, the block is destroyed and I enter a gallery. very dark.
I rush into the darkness, with only my torch to allow me to see, there is also a battery system for it, to get to the bottom where I will find a fossil under a skeleton of dinosaur. By collecting it, I will have a vision with an underwater view where I will see ruins and then strange creatures closely related to the Cthulhu.
Right after the vision, the cave starts to shake and you have to run to the exit. I get there quite difficult, rocks blocking my way at times. I'm outside, the weather seems to have gotten better but we pick up a radio signal to which we have to go by listening, the signal becoming more or less strong depending on my movements. He finally takes me back to the camp and it was deciphered by a member of the camp. Apparently, a group of researchers have found fossils with strange membranes ... Indeed, there are tentacles in the air, I'm starting to be afraid of the rest!
After this vision, I wake up in one of the tents in the camp. Some researchers have gone to unexplored areas and my character has a bad feeling, I go to my plane and look for them. From now on, I no longer have to be afraid, I am accompanied by a member of Village People, on the other hand he only follows us and turning around without paying attention can still surprise you ... No no that doesn't. has not happened!
I continue a little further to find the team's camp ... which seems to have been devastated. I go a little further to find several corpses. In a cabin, I will come across a shotgun, it seems all the same that we can kill enemies! A message then tells me to go back, so I go to my plane and go to another place.
I arrive in the middle of a large expanse of snow and it will take me more than 5 minutes of walking without anything happening for me to finally arrive at a large stone entrance. It's going to be a bit of a challenge with gravity defying rocks that will have to go down and climb, I awkwardly fell at one point and fell below the map and had to go back to a previous save to return. Solution here: save at each obstacle crossed, but hey the game is only in alpha, it will undoubtedly be corrected in its final version.
In short, I am coming to the end of this challenge.
At the bottom is a small stream. I progress to come across a giant dinosaur skeleton! It's cool but I need more to impress myself. I go on and find the entrance to a temple, enter it and eventually come across a pillar that we should be supposed to activate (with the big E symbol to indicate that an action is to be performed), but no way to make it work ... Which will finally make me give up and conclude my adventure, after more than 2 or even 3 hours of hardship.
I still wanted to see if it ended there, but I could see in gameplay videos that it was necessary to take a completely different path (for me it seemed logical to me, I saw an arch in the distance, I I wanted to go through that), but there are invisible walls that we already meet throughout the game, passages under the map, killer penguins (that's cool!) and so on. ...
To conclude, you will have understood it, At the Mountains of Madness is a game that will have rather disappointed me, it is certainly only in alpha, but already buyable at the rather high price of 20 €, which normally promises something something impressive, but which currently shows quite the opposite. The atmosphere is interesting, but the game is full of bugs and many other flaws.
- History may be interesting
- Not ugly, but not beautiful
- Item #3
- Very slow gameplay (we walk and run slowly, the maps to cross are huge and without events)
- Lots of bugs (invisible walls, accessible areas in which we have nothing to do)
- Too little guidance on what to do
You can get a quick idea of the background in the official trailer video:
And if you are interested in playing on Steam:
