It’s tough to make a survival horror game for consoles these days. It’s hard just to make a horror game, for that matter. There are really two genres: the better controlling, combat oriented ones (Dead Space, RE 5), and the slower, clumsier ones (Silent Hill, Fatal Frame). Thematically, the genre is also pretty turgid these days: you have your government biohazards, your scary cults, and your scary government cults.
It’s interesting then, to consider Cursed Mountain a new horror adventure game from produced by Deep Silver. You play a Scottish mountaineer looking for his lost brother, high up in the Himalayas. Of course, an ancient cult may be involved, and your brother is in grave danger. The game starts out as so many games (and so many more survival horror games) have started out: a taciturn hero, a deserted village, and an implacable host of enemies.
Of course, the curse is real: your brother and a sinister older climber have awakened and angered an old Bhuddist deity, whose wrath has descended upon the small town in the form of malevolent ghosts. These ghosts are frightening, at first. They groan, they shamble (or, one supposes, float), and they generally make nuisances of themselves.
Unfortunately, the ghosts stop being scary when you have to fight them. Through a ridiculous, occult-related plot-contrivance, a magical pick-axe falls into your hands. With it, you can defeat all manner of ghosts and magical sigils. Inexplicably, you can also attach various magical weapons to the axe, turning it into a veritable engine of ghost killing.
Again, unfortunately for us players, killing ghosts is both boring and far too easy. They’re slow, every single time they appear, a cut scene prepares you for the battle, and the best way to kill them (especially the groups) involves awful Wiimote gestures. To kill them, you often have to thrust the remote or the nunchuck forward: nine times out of ten, the game will not recognize this.
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