I have to admit, when I first saw the name Cursed Mountain while browsing Wii titles I might like for Christmas, I laughed pretty hard. There’s just no subtlety to it. It’s probably the first name I would think of if you’d asked me to give you a list of terrible ideas for game titles. In fact, they could’ve just called the game Mountain and I would’ve felt better about it. But sometimes, a bad title does not a bad game make.

Cursed Mountain has you taking on the role of Eric Simmons, looking for your lost brother Frank, who was sent out on an expedition to the top of a mountain in the Himalayas called “Cholomonzo” by a rich old mountain climber. Being set in the Himalayas, the game has a highly spiritual theme running throughout. You’ll read much about monks and goddesses and sacred artifacts and curses, which may sound cliché, but Cursed Mountain actually executes this quite well. The backdrop for all this is what really makes the game unique. The mountainous and harsh terrain, the howling wind and ambient sounds, the sense of utter aloneness amongst the empty villages and shacks — it all adds up to create a suspenseful and tense atmosphere, which makes the more re-hashed aspects of the game less noticeable, if not excusable.

If you’ve ever played the game Fatal Frame you’ll immediately recognize this type of gameplay. Even some older Resident Evil fans will find Cursed Mountain familiar. As Eric, you travel throughout the local villages of Cholomonzo to find clues as to what happened to your brother. These clues come in the form of journal entries and notes from local villagers, your brother, the spiritual leaders of the villagers, etc. The notes are unexpectedly thorough and detailed, even though they’re always relatively short and easy to read. The result is a surprisingly solid plot with a great sense of pacing, giving you tidbits of info to keep you interested and on the right path.

The actual gameplay, besides running around finding clues, involves killing ghosts with an ice axe bestowed with mystical powers by monks. The ghosts will walk toward you at varying paces, moving side-to-side, thus making it more difficult to stun them by shooting blasts of Raid for spirits at them. Once you’ve sufficiently stunned them, you can aim at them and click A, which will allow you to perform wiimote/nunchuk actions to finish them off, such as swinging the wiimote diagonally. The real detractor here is the movement system. I guess since the game takes place on a snowy, windy mountain they figured you should walk really slowly, and run at a pace that normal people would walk. This makes it difficult to avoid getting hit by close-up ghosts and bosses, which means you’re gonna die and have to do it all over again, which can be especially frustrating when you’re in a boss battle. There are also cool little aspects of the gameplay that provide some variety, like you’ll have to sidle along the edge of a cliff, or you’ll be walking along a path and have to dodge some huge rocks that randomly break off a rock wall.

While Cursed Mountain doesn’t really present anything new to the survival horror genre, it does toss you in an extremely immersive and relatively unused environment – an epic, dangerous mountain. One thing I noticed about the game is that there are some truly amazing camera angles in the game; for example, you’ll be running along a bridge and the camera zooms out and tilts up a bit so you can see the whole village beneath it as you cross, or as you’re approaching a set of buildings, the perspective changes to that of a man watching you coming towards him through a window, which is pretty cool. The ghost fights can get a bit stale, but when they ramp up the difficulty and have you trying to kill three ghosts at once, you won’t be thinking about that. You’ll be thinking about how crappy the movement controls are, but that’s beside the point. Cursed Mountain has a great story set in an absolutely perfect environment for a survival horror game and probably some of the best graphics I’ve seen on the Wii, unless you’re playing on a large TV that really stretches the Wii’s resolution. The voice-overs are even halfway decent. As frustrating as it can be, I’d definitely recommend at least renting this just for the experience.