Nothing scarier than motion controls.
The best thing about the game is easily its setting, taking place in the Himalayas, as you play as Eric who came hiking and climbing to rescue his missing brother. The snowy mountains, as well as the Tibetan villagers are very original, in the videogame kingdom, and make for a very refreshing and picturesque setting... even if it's, y'know, haunted. The monster design is a bit more mundane, consisting mostly of dull-looking ghosts and a few other creatures, as bosses. On the other hand, the voice-acting is pretty lackluster, for whatever reason Eric only speaks in whispers, and what's worse, cutscenes are mostly made up of animated stills, what gives? In a horror game, unless handled well, this is immersion-breaking, and in this game, such is the case, as they are laughably tacky.
The game itself is a very linear action game with horror elements. Every single instance of ghosts approaching must be dealt with in the same way: Defeating them all. A few times you'll enter "Ghost Korlos', in which you either have to defeat every ghost, as per usual, or find symbols and use the appropriate wiimote gesture, either way, the only difference between normal encounters and Ghost Korlos is that you are constantly taking damage while inside the Korlo. Ammo is unlimited, so the melee attacks are basically useless. Eric is equipped with a 'blessed pickaxe', seriously, and you can embed one of four different objects to change its properties: A strong, but slow to recharge beam, a well balanced shot, a weak-but-spread shot and another one that lets you exorcize ghosts without weakening them, at the cost of not getting health back.
And that's combat, ghosts will encroach you, and you'll try to weaken them with shots, once weakened a red sigil will appear over them, pressing the A button lets you initiate the exorcism minigame, by pulling off the gestures shown on screen you'll recover a bit of health. You can also finish off enemies with basic shots, but why would you? this mechanic makes it so that aside from bosses, dying is very hard. By the end of the game I had over 50 healing items, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I needed to restore my health this way.
Waggling... there's a ton of it in this game, but the ones for exorcism are the worst, as sometimes the game won't read your inputs, and if you fail... the enemy gets a bit of health back. Word to the wise, short and fast motions are read more often than pushing your arms forward too far. There are a few QTEs too, but nothing too bad. The worst motion controls, by far, are the ones for walking over planks of wood, since the animation is terrible and you have to waggle forward to take small steps, while trying to keep balance. It's terrible. There were also a couple of annoying segments in which you had to waggle alongside beats. Why?
Since healing items are basically superfluous, why explore? Well, you can find documents to add some story bits and world building, but more importantly, statues that will permanently increase your life bar, those are pretty cool and can be missed if you push forward too quickly. Since the game is linear and based on stages, there's no going back, so if you skipped a hidden statue you just lost a permanent health upgrade... permanently.
Honestly, the game is incredibly boring. The setting is incredible, the Tibetan Villages are alluring but... the game is so rudimentary and uninteresting. You'll fight three types of ghosts, but they might as well all be the same, re-positioning yourself is barely necessary. The story is told so poorly that it turned uninteresting, which is disappointing, because it had some interesting wrinkles here and there. But the worst part about it is that coupled with how boring the game is, the motion controls are wonky and unresponsive. Cursed Mountain showed promise, but as it is... it's better left forgotten.
4.0
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