Mountain.

TL:DR
+Beautiful Soundscape and ambience. Keyboard makes a lovely mock piano.
+ The space background upon zooming out is nifty, although it doesn't move or change.
- Quite literally no interaction in-game.
- CPU hog.
- Fairly ugly; looks at the very least 10 years out of date, made more noticable because it is TRYING to look good.
- The same seasons doing the same things on rotation.
- Only at the most three types of vegitation, with a handful of trees to each. Mostly a Ctrl C Ctrl V job all round.
- Awful shadow mapping issues - Many textures simply become a mess of flickering black lines.
- In the few hours I've had my mountain open, nothing has changed. No extra trees, no life - if all there is to see is the mountain at night or with a snowcap, why would I leave it open? Why would I bother saving it?
- Is a prime example that a minimalistic game cannot simply get by on the gimmick of 'exceedingly simple'.

Maybe I simply haven't 'played' it enough. Maybe I just don't get it; which is odd, considering minimalistic games can be something I appreciate. Mountain is an aquired taste, one I wouldn't have tried if it wasn't for its nomination at the Game Awards the other day. Having enjoyed games like Proteus, Dear Esther and to an extent Sword and Sworcery, I thought I might like this, but there is a slew of reasons why I'm unable to.

Unfortunately, this 'Video Game' is all 'video' and no 'game'. There are no controls at all, and past the little Brain Training doodle boxes at the beginning of the 'generation' the only interaction you will have with the Mountain explicitly is zooming in and out and wazzing it around from side to side. Besides this, the bottom two rows of keys on your keyboard act as a mock piano, allowing you to create some beautiful minor soundscapes of your own.

The ambience of the wind and the twinkle of the piano is actually the game's strongest point, and the only one I would award credit for. Clearly, they want you to feel something with this Mountain, but the sounds very quickly become the only thing to which you have any connection. The Mountain (mine atleast) was practically barren, and barely changed noticably at all in the two hours I had it open (it is still running as I type) except a few dustings of snow as seasons shifted and an extra spatter of orange in Autumn. The only thing of note that happened was the appearance of a skull. Devoid of context and completely out of place, it simply floated there with the rest of the pointless immobile objects until it snowed again.

From a technical standpoint, the feelings you should have toward this natural structure simply fall further. The horrendous geometry, poor texture work, shoddy repeating trees, small size, lack of colour variation, inability to zoom in close enough to inspect properly and crappy lightshafts make the game in its entirety feel and look like a loading screen from a game released 12 years ago, huge Xbox-style, and drag you back out of whatever 'experience' you should be having. Not good at all, considering the light could have aided it.

Finally, I also made note of a post regarding Mountain that stated you should simply 'leave it open', which is all well and good but the app is quite a CPU hog, warming up my i5 4670K 3.8GHz a fair amount, spiking a lot, and having a load similar to Alien Isolation or GTA 4. Why? Furthermore, with the 'keep it running' philosophy being emphasised by the ability to swap to smaller windowed modes quickly on the fly I'm surprised to see that the 4:3 windows it chooses actually chop off text that occasionally appears in the top-left of the game screen. Yet something else that doesn't even work as intended.

I would have LOVED to see more varied foliage, better geometry, and perhaps even to pull at the humanity it is obviously tying to reach for have a little creature or two, maybe a tiny cabin in those copy-paste trees, anything that would make you stop and look for more than ten seconds (and honestly I thought this was what I was buying). I wouldn't want Banished - Don't Touch Us We're On a Mountain edition or anything too extensive civilisation-wise, but it this game wished to play at simplicity, then simplicity across a wider range of landscape and visual tools would have been to its aid, ENORMOUSLY. Even for 99p I cannot recommend this; its an ugly background processor warmer with no redeeming qualities except the sound. The only other potential positive I could draw from it is that it has exponential potential, and I'd check in on it every few months, but I feel I say that in vain as the dev's seem to be in the completely wrong frame of mind for what most people want.

Mountain. TL:DR +Beautiful Soundscape and ambience. Keyboard makes a lovely mock piano. + The space background upon zooming out is nifty, although it doesn't move or change. - Quite literally no interaction in-game. - CPU hog. - Fairly ugly; looks at the very least 10 years out of date, made more noticable because it is TRYING to look good. - The same seasons doing the same things on rotation. - Only at the most three types of vegitation, with a handful of trees to each. Mostly a Ctrl C Ctrl V job all round. - Awful shadow mapping issues - Many textures simply become a mess of flickering black lines. - In the few hours I've had my mountain open, nothing has changed. No extra trees, no life - if all there is to see is the mountain at night or with a snowcap, why would I leave it open? Why would I bother saving it? - Is a prime example that a minimalistic game cannot simply get by on the gimmick of 'exceedingly simple'. Maybe I simply haven't 'played' it enough. Maybe I just don't get it; which is odd, considering minimalistic games can be something I appreciate. Mountain is an aquired taste, one I wouldn't have tried if it wasn't for its nomination at the Game Awards the other day. Having enjoyed games like Proteus, Dear Esther and to an extent Sword and Sworcery, I thought I might like this, but there is a slew of reasons why I'm unable to. Unfortunately, this 'Video Game' is all 'video' and no 'game'. There are no controls at all, and past the little Brain Training doodle boxes at the beginning of the 'generation' the only interaction you will have with the Mountain explicitly is zooming in and out and wazzing it around from side to side. Besides this, the bottom two rows of keys on your keyboard act as a mock piano, allowing you to create some beautiful minor soundscapes of your own. The ambience of the wind and the twinkle of the piano is actually the game's strongest point, and the only one I would award credit for. Clearly, they want you to feel something with this Mountain, but the sounds very quickly become the only thing to which you have any connection. The Mountain (mine atleast) was practically barren, and barely changed noticably at all in the two hours I had it open (it is still running as I type) except a few dustings of snow as seasons shifted and an extra spatter of orange in Autumn. The only thing of note that happened was the appearance of a skull. Devoid of context and completely out of place, it simply floated there with the rest of the pointless immobile objects until it snowed again. From a technical standpoint, the feelings you should have toward this natural structure simply fall further. The horrendous geometry, poor texture work, shoddy repeating trees, small size, lack of colour variation, inability to zoom in close enough to inspect properly and crappy lightshafts make the game in its entirety feel and look like a loading screen from a game released 12 years ago, huge Xbox-style, and drag you back out of whatever 'experience' you should be having. Not good at all, considering the light could have aided it. Finally, I also made note of a post regarding Mountain that stated you should simply 'leave it open', which is all well and good but the app is quite a CPU hog, warming up my i5 4670K 3.8GHz a fair amount, spiking a lot, and having a load similar to Alien Isolation or GTA 4. Why? Furthermore, with the 'keep it running' philosophy being emphasised by the ability to swap to smaller windowed modes quickly on the fly I'm surprised to see that the 4:3 windows it chooses actually chop off text that occasionally appears in the top-left of the game screen. Yet something else that doesn't even work as intended. I would have LOVED to see more varied foliage, better geometry, and perhaps even to pull at the humanity it is obviously tying to reach for have a little creature or two, maybe a tiny cabin in those copy-paste trees, anything that would make you stop and look for more than ten seconds (and honestly I thought this was what I was buying). I wouldn't want Banished - Don't Touch Us We're On a Mountain edition or anything too extensive civilisation-wise, but it this game wished to play at simplicity, then simplicity across a wider range of landscape and visual tools would have been to its aid, ENORMOUSLY. Even for 99p I cannot recommend this; its an ugly background processor warmer with no redeeming qualities except the sound. The only other potential positive I could draw from it is that it has exponential potential, and I'd check in on it every few months, but I feel I say that in vain as the dev's seem to be in the completely wrong frame of mind for what most people want.