Featured Content / Impressions

The Curse of Mount Madre Impression

by Michael Baker · February 12, 2025

There are some good ideas at the heart of this game; it’s the implementation that needs work.

It’s never a fun thing to be negative when I write for RPGamer, but it’s sometimes necessary. Being fair means telling it as it is, even when you would rather not. That said, it’s time to discuss The Curse of Mount Madre, an indie RPG by Kevin Musto.

Starting with the positives, The Curse of Mount Madre takes on a thematic setting less often used in role-playing video games. The player embarks on a Wild West treasure hunt through a land of desert mesas and abandoned mines, and the game is committed to the bit. The voxel-based character models are decently expressive, and they even resemble the stylish character portrait art. I find myself frustrated and disappointed that I couldn’t get more than an hour into this game—and hardly out of the first town, at that.

For the rest, I am afraid we need to resort to bullet points.

The game itself does not seem to be well optimized. While I’ll admit my laptop isn’t any sort of powerhouse, it shouldn’t be experiencing the degree of slowdown or fan hyperventilation I get just by starting this game up. I’ve had ports of PlayStation 4 games work better—and this game is certainly not at that level of hardware demand.
The sense of scale in locations is overly broad and unbalanced. Even in the starting town, there’s so much space between the buildings that a walk from the saloon to the general store next door feels like half a mile. As the screen scrolls along, it’s possible to have, in town, large expanses of absolutely nothing to see. It is somehow too empty to feel like the Old West of the movies, where a town might be half a dozen buildings in two rows along a nominal street. This extends to the buildings in town, where the saloon has all the internal space of an empty cathedral and the inside-to-outside balance of a TARDIS.
Combat is simple, unimaginative, and slow. Enemy and ally turns cycle through, and while it feels like there’s more underlying the turn order, nothing stands out. Combined with the encounter rate, and it erodes the player’s patience like a desert wind. Early fights against the first monsters in the game took far too long to resolve with limited options for attacks.
Between the increasing game slowdown, the high rate of repetitive combat, and the fact that the area outside of town is a featureless desert with no direction given, I never made it to the mines that are supposedly central to the game’s treasure-hunting plot.

In all honesty, The Curse of Mount Madre could have an exceptional story of treasure, greed, and skullduggery, and I wouldn’t know, because getting there was more effort than it was worth. This is a shame, as the Wild West of the movies is something we could see more of in video games. There are some good ideas at the heart of this game; it’s the implementation that needs work. I can only hope the developer takes this as a good learning experience as he moves forward.