THE MAKING OF . . .
MUNDAUN
How an illustrator’s pencils captured the sinister side of an idyllic Alpine community
By Jon Bailes
Format PC, PS4, XBox One
Developer Hidden Fields
Publisher MWM Interactive
Origin Switzerland
Release 2021
This is a game of grey areas. Figuratively, in the mystery and cloudy morals of its horrorfilled spaces, but also very literally, given that each of its vistas has been sketched in with pencil. Other games incorporate manual crafts into their aesthetic, from Plasticine models to paper cutouts, but Mundaun stands out because it finds the friction in this encounter. Its rural weave plays in the smudges between artisanal application and digital trickery, between everyday reality, whispered folklore and sheer fantasy.
It’s not surprising, then, that its creator has his feet planted in both old and new media. Michel Ziegler studied computer science and worked as a software engineer but, finding himself more and more attracted to the medium of comics, went back to university at the age of 25 to attain his second degree, in illustration. It was here that his crossover experiments began.
“My bachelor’s project started as a comic about a virtual world,” Ziegler says. To help realise the comic’s setting, he created a model of the world and its inhabitants in a game engine. The result captured his attention more than the comic it was made to support, and so he refocused on making it into a game prototype, The Colony, which in turn inspired him to create a full game.
When Ziegler began work on it after graduation, he had decided only on a tone (“rather dark and strange but also beautiful”) and a setting: Mundaun, a remote municipality in the Swiss Alps. It was a decision inspired by a personal connection to the region – Ziegler holidayed there regularly as a child and saw it as a second home. “It’s very sparsely populated and just an amazing place to go on adventures and let your fantasy run wild as a kid,” he says. “Since my biggest fascination with games is their ability to provide players with a place and a world to explore, I felt this place was perfect for that.”
If this all sounds a little idyllic for a game about demonic pacts and headless wandering goats, Ziegler also saw a dark underside to the serenity. “The sparseness of the population and buildings evokes a sense of isolation,” he says. “You feel lost in this nature with the tall mountains looking down at you, casting enormous shadows. It’s archaic, and to me that is one of the biggest sources of unease.”