14 DAY TRIAL // 
When I first thought about reviewing this game, I was quite excited. Well, who wouldn't be? The game promises a mixture of Amnesia's horror with the addictive gameplay of Dear Esther, and it's all done by Polypusher Studios, which is just a one-man crew: Matthew Clifton.
The trailer looks truly promising and the voice doing the narration only made me want it more. But are the rumors really true? Let me break it down for you, Myth Buster style.
Montague's Mount is a first-person psychological game seasoned with all kinds of goodies, like puzzles, exploration, a touch of adventure and a hand-full of thriller. The result is an experience that begins on a strange Irish island and ends abruptly leaving room for a sequel: Liberation.
Story
Even before the game begins, you're told that the events are based on a true story. This precise aspect, common mostly in Hollywood productions, made me very excited as you never know how much is real and how much is fiction. So questions start to pop into one’s head: Did this single event really happen? How would the main character solve this? What character lived to tell this dreadful tale?
There are lots of twists and turns to the story, as you begin to find out more things about yourself, some more gruesome than others. The story is quite linear for what is meant to be an exploration horror adventure thriller played in the first-person perspective. You must travel to various places on the island, find certain objects, solve some puzzles and it's up to the next part, where you must do the same things (with different objects and puzzles).
Gameplay
It all rather goes downhill from here. Right after you find the walking stick, you commence to walk slowly (I mean really, really slowly) and discover the spooky island. The island is not small, and the fact that you have the speed of a snail climbing a hill with wind in its face can get rather annoying. On top of that, some puzzles require that you travel back and forth to certain areas, thus almost entirely spoiling the horror atmosphere created.
Towards the end, the horror feeling, the piles of dead bodies and the ghostly apparitions seem to have little importance as you just want to move faster, find the missing objects, solve the puzzle, find the truth about yourself and get it over with. I'm really hoping that in the sequel the main character gets a miraculous recovery and can explore the rest of the island on both feet.
Remember I said the game was based on a true story? This is repeated at the end of the game, probably hoping that it will cause a more dramatic effect. Unfortunately, after playing the game, you soon find out that besides some fragments of the story, very little can actually be true, as the island is filled with all kinds of mechanical contraptions and puzzles that don't normally belong in any piece of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Let's take, for example, the puzzle when you need to find a certain number of candles to open a gate. While walking around searching for sticks of unlit wax candles, you come across dozens of lit candles, that can be used just as well to power up the strange device (also, who uses a hot air, candle-powered mechanism to open a metal gate?); but no, on deserted Irish islands, only fresh candles can be used.
Most of the puzzles require a lot of searching for missing elements before starting to solve them. The solving part feels awkward as most of these gadgets and machineries don't belong in this type of horror story. “It's a game!” some of you might say. I'm quite aware of this, but I’m still latching on the “Based on a true story” statement at the beginning and the end of the game.
Why should you play this game again? There are a few reasons, but not as significant as to make a person walk the entire island again: collectibles (wooden crosses, five pictures of Ireland hidden in five secret locations) and several achievements.
Besides the visual glitches, which are understandable for a game made by a one-man team, I've encountered a more disturbing bug, which made me quit the game, and reload from a checkpoint that I've never checked, thus adding to the frustration.
Spoiler Alert: Don't climb the wooden log on the Fisherman's Bach, because you will not be able to return. There is a metal lever you must activate at the base of the metal gate.
Audio and Video
The game has a nice, dark and melancholic mood created by the pixelated graphics and all the personal objects just lying around on the island. The overall visuals are more than decent and help the player immerse in the psychological part of the story. Paying increased attention to the flowers and other props reveal small animation quirks and some texture collision glitches.
The game promises to be the only one that promotes the Irish language Gaeilge, which is a good thing. Yet, when you choose another language from the options menu and only the subtitles are in that particular language, you begin to think that this is too much promoting.
Conclusion
All the things promised by the creator of the game are there: a very nice story, Amnesia elements, a horror setting, psychological struggles; but all of them seem to be blown away by the hurricane of difficult, out-of-context puzzles, and of course, the fact that you're playing the game in first gear.
I can't say it's a bad game, I enjoyed it. Yet, it definitely hasn't risen up to the expectations I had before playing it. Maybe if I had tried playing it using the Oculus Rift VR Headset... I guess I'll have to wait for the sequel that was advertised as the end of the Montague's Mount: it will soon appear for PC, Mac and Linux and it will be called “Liberation.”
