While playing Cabela's Survival, I found myself reminded of another game called Cursed Mountain (which I had never finished). That game also created an aesthetic around surviving in the freezing wilderness, and it succeeded at giving the player a sense of urgency, of fighting for your life. While there is a lot of fun to be had with the game, its control flaws originally compelled me to put it down and forget about it.
Anyway, I decided to revisit Cursed Mountain for this journal, and I'm glad I did.
The game goes to great lengths to create it's aesthetic quality: a creepy mood that keeps the player on edge, and it usually succeeds. First of all, the player character moves pretty sluggishly. This seemed awkward at first, but somehow just feels right for the setting. Our hero is high up in the mountains wearing heavy climbing gear, after all. Secondly, while the graphics aren't stellar, there is a lot of careful detail in the environments. Every room in every building has character.
Third, there is the dynamic atmosphere. As you move into a dangerous area, the colors slowly bleach out to leave an eerie black-and-white image of your surroundings, and the ambient noise warps and changes. It really communicates a feeling of dread to the player.
The combat isn't perfect, but does at least provide an interesting example of giving players a choice instead of a problem. First, there is the option of fighting in melee or using ranged attacks. My strategy usually employs both depending on the situation, but it's possible to clear most encounters using only one or the other. (A few bosses require the ranged weapon to finish them off, but can still be fought with melee)
Second, the player acquires different ranged weapons throughout the game (and upgrades for them). At the level I reached so far, there are two options: one which fires a quick, powerful shot of energy but takes a little while to recharge, and one which fires a slower-moving blast, but recharges much faster allowing for rapid-fire. A few specific situations might encourage one strategy over the other, but they're both viable options.
Cursed Mountain's biggest flaw is shared with many Wii titles: unresponsive motion controls. Aiming your weapon with the pointer works quite well, but the gestures (which the game uses mainly for pointless quick-time events) will sometimes fail to register. Since you typically need to succeed at these events to defeat or evade an enemy, failure by the game to read your motions can spell the difference between victory and death.
"Press X to Not Die" becomes "Wildly flail the remote like a mental patient to Not Die."
In the end, Cursed Mountain is just another title whose developers thought the Wii would be the perfect engine for bold new ideas, but the reality of the game's execution fell far short of expectations. Lousy implementation of the motion technology ruined an otherwise great idea. It's something of a teachable moment: our dreams may be big, but technology ultimately determines the reality our dreams turn into, and the most powerful gaming tool in the industry is useless if developers (or players) don't know how to effectively use it.
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