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Montague's Mount

Score: 65%
ESRB: Not Rated
Publisher: Mastertronic
Developer: PolyPusher Studios
Media: Download/1
Players: 1
Genre: Puzzle/ Themed/ Adventure

Graphics & Sound:

Indie developer PolyPusher Studios has just released Montague’s Mount, a title based loosely on the lead developer’s own experience with moving to Ireland. The game replaces standard guns and visual horror with a more psychological approach to drawing you in. To enhance the draw, the developers use the environment and the music in a positive way to get into your head.

Montague’s Mount does a decent job at bringing home the eeriness of isolation by delivering an overgrown environment to navigate on a closed island off the coast of Ireland. As such, the constant rain, the drab sky, and the chaotically slung objects help add to the disturbed state of mind of the character and to the slowed-down pace of the game.

Taking place in isolation, the game also relies on environmental sounds for most of its audio presence and feedback. The majority of the time, the player will hear typical sounds of the ocean and rain, mixing in footsteps and other localized sounds including the sporadic coughing of the character as he obviously is run down from traipsing around in the rain looking for answers. At key moments, however, the character’s own monologue reveals his back story and the things going through his mind, delivered by UK actor Derek Riddell (State of Mind). As an added touch, the musical elements are excellent and add to the eerie nature of the game.


Gameplay:

Waking and unaware of his presence after what is believed to be a boating accident, our character immediately needs to begin exploring his surroundings for clues as to the truth. In Montague’s Mount, you will need to walk around the desolate island solving puzzles that range from typical fetch and return with the item conclusions, to some that may actually tweak a brain cell or two.

Using the environmental clues and notes left around the environment, you will progress through a number of checkpoints before finally reaching the final scene in the game. At your character’s disposal is an on-screen compass that can be toggled at any time and the ability to carry up to five inventory items. While most of the game will never cause the need to hold more than five objects, you may need to place them where they belong (you cannot drop anything) to open up a slot occasionally.

One thing about Montague’s Mount to note is that the game – from a gameplay standpoint – is strictly based on exploration and puzzle-solving, as well as getting into the mind of our lead character. For the most part, the developers have done a nice job on balancing these elements and have even included a few secrets and also some small achievements that can be accomplished as you go.

The environment, however, does contain a lot of reused assets that don’t distinguish areas quite as well as they could be. Additionally, the gameplay is very, very slow. If there were more unique things to explore and more interactions, it would be understandable, but going back and forth without the ability to run adds to the slow pace of this 4 1/2+ hour game. There are also some buggy moments with the environment and when reloading the game that will hopefully be fixed with future updates.


Difficulty:

By its nature of exploration and puzzle-solving, Montague’s Mount is a slow-paced game that anyone could easily pick up and play. Since character movement is based on basic keyboard and mouse controls, the learning curve from this perspective is not very high as well. The developers have also done a decent job of putting clues into the environment to help out with some of the more difficult puzzles, but you will still have to spark some electricity in your brain to get through a few of them. In fact, I got tripped up a couple of times and had to walk away and come back with a new perspective.

That said, everything you need to know is included within the environmental areas of the game, for the most part. Proceeding through checkpoints will generally unlock new areas, so as such, some of the back and forth exploration is relatively limited. There was one puzzle that had me turning to the Internet (and I think most will need to), but was immediately solvable upon a bit of research. The only issue that I really had with the puzzles in general was another puzzle that, upon triggering something, locked the player out from being able to re-read the clue and the only way would be to restart from the last save point. All that said, however, it was refreshing to have the need to pull out a pen and scribble on the back of an envelope to jot down notes that will help solve the next puzzle and unlock the next area.


Game Mechanics:

As mentioned, Montague’s Mount utilizes the keyboard/mouse combo and anyone familiar with most first person games will feel right at home with the standard WASD controls. A few other keys will toggle things like the compass and your inventory, and you can use the mouse scroll wheel to select from those items. Also, on numerous occasions, having more than one button pressed will act like sticky keys and character movement won’t stop (easily solvable with more key presses).

I was unfortunately hugely disappointed that the Xbox controller wasn’t fully supported (yet?). It did allow basic movement, although very slow with no way to adjust sensitivity. The controller buttons also didn’t seem to work for anything, so it was back to the keyboard/mouse setup. Although untested for this review, Montague’s Mount also supports the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and I can only imagine that being immersed in the environment would be appealing.

Montague’s Mount is an interesting game that will likely appeal to those out there who like to play through puzzle-solving games that require more than fetch and retrieve gameplay (although there is some here too). That said, the game may not appeal to as wide of an audience as a lot of games, but the independent development of Montague’s Mount is a positive move for others like them. You can also check them out as they get the game onto Steam with its Greenlight initiative that has now pushed through.


-Woody, GameVortex Communications
AKA Shane Wodele

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8, Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 (2x 2.8 GHz) or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2x 2.5 GHz); Radeon HD 2900 XT or GeForce 8800 GTX; 2 GB RAM

Mac: OS X 10.7 (Lion) or above; Intel Core I5 (4x 2.7 GHz); Radeon HD 5750 or GeForce GT 640M; 2GB RAM Patched to version 1.01

 

Test System:



Mac Book Pro with the following installed as a dual-boot:
Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1 installed; Intel Core i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz; 8GB RAM; NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M

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