800K Wishlists, 69 on Metacritic: The Mound's Rocky Launch

Eight hundred thousand wishlists on Steam is the kind of number most indie studios dream about. For ACE Team, the Chilean developer behind The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu, it should have been the launchpad for a triumphant release. Instead, the Lovecraftian co-op extraction horror arrived yesterday on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S to a 69 on Metacritic and a growing list of performance complaints that have taken some of the shine off what was one of 2026's most-anticipated indie launches.

In a post on Steam, ACE Team struck an optimistic tone:

"A huge thanks to all our community from everyone at ACE Team. We're thrilled with the amount of support and attention the game has received. The adventure is only beginning, and we can't wait to see everyone in the Valdivian jungle now that the game is out."

Gratitude is nice, but the reality on the ground is rougher than that message suggests. Reviews have landed across a wide spectrum, from CGMagazine's 8/10 down to DayOne's 6.5/10, and the common thread running through almost all of them is the same: the difficulty curve is punishing to the point of frustration, and the game doesn't give players enough tools to manage it. Dualshockers gave it a 7.5, praising the co-op horror design but noting that "progressing feels frustratingly difficult" and that "limited meta-progression" leaves knowledge as your only real weapon. IGN's 7/10 echoed the sentiment, calling for "more nuanced difficulty options, especially for introducing newer players."

I'm a horror fan. I love a game that doesn't hold your hand. But there's a difference between a game that's hard because it respects you and a game that's hard because it hasn't given you the vocabulary to engage with its systems. When multiple reviewers independently flag the same friction point, it stops being a skill issue and starts being a design one.

Performance on console is worse

The review scores only tell half the story. On the technical side, reports from players and outlets paint a grim picture, particularly on Xbox Series S. Pure Xbox's own reviewer, who spent over 25 hours with the game, recommended Series S owners skip it entirely until performance patches arrive, noting the console "wholly struggles to keep up" visually. PC isn't immune either. Destructoid's settings guide noted lag even on a system running an AMD Radeon 9060 XT, well above the recommended specs, and advised players to cap their frame rate at 60 and enable upscaling just to get a stable experience. When your optimization guide for a new release boils down to "turn everything to Low and hope," something has gone wrong in the oven.

The game launched at £24.99 for the Standard Edition and £34.99 for the Deluxe, which bundles in an exclusive mission pack, two extra characters, and cosmetic gear. ACE Team also included a free DLC mission at launch and a free Lost Explorer's Sword Pack for anyone who buys within the first two weeks. That 800,000-wishlist milestone unlocked a 20% launch discount as well. On the generosity front, I have no complaints. The pricing is fair, the bonus content is a good gesture, and the game supports full crossplay across all platforms with Xbox Play Anywhere. If you're going to launch a co-op game in 2026, that's the baseline, and ACE Team met it.

But generosity doesn't fix frame drops, and a launch discount doesn't smooth out a difficulty curve that multiple critics flagged as a barrier to enjoyment. The Mound has a strong foundation: its sanity system, which distorts your perception with hallucinations and misleading audio as expeditions progress, is a clever hook that differentiates it from the extraction pack. The proximity voice chat, the 18 handcrafted maps, the corrupted-teammate mechanic where dead players can turn against their squad. There's real ambition here. ACE Team has always been a studio that swings big, going back to Zeno Clash and Rock of Ages, and The Mound is no exception.

The gap between 800,000 wishlists and a 69 on Metacritic is where the conversation gets interesting, though. Wishlists measure curiosity. Review scores measure execution. ACE Team clearly nailed the pitch: Lovecraftian horror meets co-op extraction in a dense jungle setting. What they didn't nail, at least not yet, is the moment-to-moment experience of actually playing through those first brutal hours. If the studio can address the performance issues quickly and tune the early-game difficulty so it stops hemorrhaging new players before they reach the good stuff, The Mound could still find its audience. That wishlist number proves the appetite is there. Right now, the game just isn't serving the meal people ordered.