One of the first things that may strike you about Mundaun, a very unsettling horror game that released earlier this year, is just how comfortable with weirdness it is. There are hay people hunting you in the night, monstrous masks inspired by traditional Swiss carnival costumes, and the decapitated head of the goat Allegria, bleating and chattering from your backpack.
Many horror games either try to establish a sense of mundane familiarity in a recognisable, contemporary world before shattering that familiarity, or else rely on the dusty, done-to-death setting of haunted manors. In most cases, neither approach does much to surprise. Horror often relies on the grotesque, but Mundaun’s weirdness is different. It is an earthy kind of weirdness, a strangeness with roots so deep that it might be confused with familiarity. It’s a horror that smells not of blood, but of hay and dung, snow and soot.