A brand new trailer for one of 2026’s most unusual-looking psychological horror games is sure to grab the attention of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag fans, for a laundry list of different reasons…
Alright, never mind– you got me; I’m mostly just certain Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag lovers will love it because you can captain a great big 17th-century-looking ship.
I have had my eye on The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu for a while now. The premise and the perception-distorting co-op gameplay are cool and all (more on that shortly), but the developers are the real reason I’ve been keeping tabs on it.
ACE Team Software S.A., better known as ACE Team, is quite possibly one of the wackiest, most talented dev teams out there at the moment, yet I’d wager that the majority of people reading this article have never heard of them.
They are the minds behind the likes of Zeno Clash, The Deadly Tower of Monsters, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, The Eternal Cylinder and Rock of Ages– games that are so incredibly unique from one another that it’s frankly baffling they were all developed by the same team.
Oh, and did I mention that all of the games I just listed absolutely slap?
The games I just listed feature an absolutely bizarre mishmash of different genres, yet these guys have somehow seemingly never missed once over the past two decades.
Anyway, enough glazing from me. My point is that whatever these guys choose to do next, I’m going to be there on day one… and it just so happens that they’ve decided to make a foray into the co-op horror genre.
The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu has been making the rounds online again over the past couple of days as a result of the new trailer that dropped for the upcoming game during the recent 2025 Xbox Partner Preview Showcase.
At first glance, it might seem that Ace Team are, for once, playing it a little bit safe with this game. It’s a gory, first-person combat game with some multiplayer elements– and it’s even got a relatively straightforward art style to it.
However, it seems that the new, bombastic trailer has been designed to pull the common man in, because the gameplay loop itself sounds anything but ordinary.
Throughout the course of a playthrough, each individual player in your four-man crew is going to experience a wide variety of different hallucinations.
As the devs themselves explain, the supernatural forces at play will attempt to “distort your perception of every situation to throw you off balance” as the “border that separates reality from illusion blurs, sowing doubt and paranoia among your group.”
Basically, you’re going to have to work together to figure out if, for example, the enemy on your screen is indeed a real enemy… and not your own teammate. Friendly fire is always on, by the way.
I just think it sounds like such a neat concept for a game, and I thoroughly trust in ACE Team to deliver on something like this.
Keep an eye out for The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu when it releases sometime next year, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, and Steam.
