Cursed Mountain is a survival horror-adventure

Adventure game

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...

 video game for the Wii

Wii

The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...

 developed by Sproing Interactive, in collaboration with, and published by Deep Silver Vienna. It was released on August 25, 2009 in North America. The game focuses on a mountaineer

Mountaineer

-Sports:*Mountaineering, the sport, hobby or profession of walking, hiking, trekking and climbing up mountains, also known as alpinism-University athletic teams and mascots:*Appalachian State Mountaineers, the athletic teams of Appalachian State University...

 searching for his lost brother in the Himalayas

Himalayas

The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...

. A PC

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

 version of the game was released on February 5, 2010 in Europe. It is available globally via digital download on GamersGate

GamersGate

GamersGate AB is a Sweden-based online video game store offering PC games, Mac games and electronic guides via direct download. It is a competitor to online video game services such as Valve's Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse....

.

Gameplay

Combat primarily consists of encounters with the angry souls of monks and climbers who are trapped in Bardo, a spiritual realm in between this life and the next. The player must stun the enemies and make gestures with the Wii Remote to free their souls. The game also makes use of other features of the Wii Remote, such as its built-in speaker.

Plot

Cursed Mountain is set in the late 1980s

1980s

File:1980s decade montage.png|thumb|400px|From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, lifted off in 1981; American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eased tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the end of the Cold War; The Fall of the Berlin Wall in...

, due to the lack of technology available in the time period. The entire course of the game takes place on a mountain in the Himalayas named Chomolonzo

Chomo Lonzo

Chomo Lonzo is a mountain in Tibet, 5 km northeast of Makalu in the Mahalungur or Khumbu Himalayas. Alternate spellings of the same name include Chomolonzo, Chomolönzo, Chomo Lönzo, Jomolönzo, and Lhamalangcho....

, which the natives call "the Sacred One". The protagonist, Eric Simmons, is searching for his lost brother, Frank, who was hired by Edward Bennett to retrieve a sacred artifact called a terma. The goddess of the mountain became angry, and she bestowed a powerful curse upon Chomolonzo, trapping Frank and everyone who could not escape in time. The storyline of the game is heavily influenced by Buddhism

Buddhism

Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...

 and Tibet

Tibet

Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

an folklore.

Development

Cursed Mountain was a collaborative development effort by 16 companies consisting of 236 people in 17 unique locations in 14 different countries.

Reception

N-Zone magazine gave the game a score of 82%. Praise was given to the game's pacing and atmosphere, with criticism aimed at the game's sometimes sluggish controls. Blast magazine awarded the game a 7.7 out of 10, stating that the "story, setting and atmosphere are the keys to Cursed Mountain" while "the controls or pacing frustrate you a bit". About.com

About.com

About.com is an online source for original information and advice. It is written in English, and is aimed primarily at North Americans. It is owned by The New York Times Company....

was less enthusiastic, giving the game a 3 out of 5 and referring to the controls as "infuriating" and the finale as "laughably pretentious." IGN and GameSpot both awarded the title a score of 7.5 praising the atmosphere and game play.

Koch, the owner of Deep Silver Vienna, closed the studio on January 30, 2010.