Toilets, Hay Carts, And Talking Goats: Inside the Weird Horror of 'Mundaun'

Video game horror is frequently noisy and abrasive, but Mundaun exists on the opposite side of the spectrum, a quiet slice of dark tension about revisiting a childhood home in the mountains after the passing of your grandfather leads to discovering a long-hidden secret. It's also utterly striking, due to a unique look derived from every texture in the game being hand-drawn by Mundaun's designer, artist, and jack-of-all-trades creative, Michel Ziegler.

Mundaun has some combat and it works fine, but the vast majority of the game is spent poking and prodding this snowy village and unpacking the weirdness around every corner.

Some of the best horror oscillates between scaring the audience and making them laugh, a way of providing levity and making people forget the next scare is possibly around the corner. Mundaun is especially great at this, in ways big and small, whether it's engaging with the colorfully strange cast of characters that populate its small town, or allowing the player to use every bathroom in the game to relieve themselves. (Believe me, I asked about this part.)

Or the talking goat head that's in your bag?

Or being able to magically summon a goofy vehicle designed to collect hay by staring at a poster advertising said vehicle long enough for the vehicle to appear out of thin air?

Or, in the dark of night, navigating walking stacks of hay who are out to kill you by, in effect, turning you into a walking stack of hay? 

It all works in practice, promise, and there are plenty of moments where Mundaun is genuinely terrifying. Mundaun is special, the kind of game that'll end up on a lot of critics' "best of" lists at the end of the year, with most people going "Uh, so what game was that again?"

I wanted to know more about how this quirky game was made, so I went right to the source, and asked Michel Zeigler to start answering my questions about Mundaun's toilet situation.

Waypoint: Let's start with the most important question: what's up with all the toilets in the game?
Michel Zeigler: Well, I tried to bring some much needed realism to the horror genre. There are just too many games where you can go through a long journey, fight evil, etc. without ever having to use a toilet. That’s just a huge immersion breaker, and creating an immersive world and atmosphere in Mundaun was one of the most important goals for me. You are actually the first to comment on the toilets, which is interesting!

This game feels very personal, which no doubt is attributable in some degree to the hand-drawn art, but does this game have a personal connection to you in other ways?
The alpine landscapes of the game are based on a real place where my family spent holidays multiple times a year, since before I was born. As a child I was always walking around, exploring, finding little hidden nooks and crannies in this huge, quiet and somewhat empty landscape. My hope is that Mundaun players experience some of that exploration, being lost in a place, but through a dark lens. That darker touch is inspired by Swiss folk tales, which have always fascinated me because they combine very grounded and mundane things with supernatural elements and characters.

How early on did you settle on the idea of drawing the art by hand in this way, and at which point did you realize "oh no, this is a terrible idea"?
From the very start. I did this short game The Colony before getting started on Mundaun, also using a combination of hand drawing with 3D. I enjoyed that medium a lot and wanted to expand on it with this title. Working on actual physical paper just feels much better and more inspiring to me, and I cherished and needed those short respites from all the technical, purely digital work. Putting a hand-pencilled texture on a 3D model for the first time is such a magical moment, and I enjoy a process that is somewhat unwieldy and indirect, as it can add an element of surprise and randomness.

Can you elaborate a bit on the process of having your drawings make it into the game? Are you sitting down with a tablet to do the original drawing, or is it happening on real paper?
As a matter of fact, it is drawn with a pencil on real paper (the stuff that comes from trees). 

First, the 3D model is created on the computer and UV-unwrapped to get a 2D representation of the texture mapping. This texture map is printed out on paper and then the outlines of the parts are broadly traced onto a new sheet of paper (using a light table). Then I draw the textures into the map and scan it back in once it’s finished. This drawing is then mapped onto the 3D model and I see how the combination of the two things look for the first time. This is the moment that makes it worth it. There’s a weird magic to seeing the flat drawing you just made as a three dimensional thing and being able to turn it and look at it from all sides.

Can you talk about your own history with horror, what you find interesting about the genre, and how that became tied up in telling this story?
I’m very much drawn to an atmosphere of unease, whether I come across it in the horror genre itself or somewhere else. The feeling that you are in a place you don’t fully understand, with something below the surface seeming to be working against you. I’m fascinated by places that are old with histories that stretch into the present. In that way, The Shining left a big impression on me. The uncertainty of time, as well as history and present becoming blurred, are both important elements of Mundaun. 

I find that visual things like architecture, a piece of clothing or any object can contribute a lot to the tone just by their design. Framing, set design and lighting can have a huge impact on how something feels. Sometimes I think the openness of the outdoors under a bright sky can be just as crushing as a very tight and dark corridor. These are things I have observed in many older films of the horror genre. They have an archaic feeling, which to me is the essence of horror—my goal is that some of that has found its way into Mundaun as well.

I have to admit I laughed every time I summoned the hay truck into existence, because frequently it would bounce into the world incorrectly. Can you talk a little bit more about including the truck in the game? I was genuinely taken by a game of this scope having full-on driving mechanics!
The truck was actually the first object I created for Mundaun. I have been a huge fan of them since I first saw them collecting hay on the steep slopes of mountains as a child – what a great looking machine. I knew I wanted to include things that are very specific to the alpine terrain, even, or especially, if that meant having to create the mechanics to back it up. I feel like games limit themselves too much sometimes by cutting features back to be bare bones or to include an expected set of mechanics for a genre. For you to say that you were surprised that driving was apart the game in this form is exactly what I like to hear!

The game is very, very precious with a common horror trope: jump scares. The most effective one happens in the snow, with the creature roaming around. You definitely got me there. What was your approach to the idea of the jump scare and the preciousness of deploying it?
I don’t like horror where you basically just wait for the next jump scare to happen, I find that to be much too stressful. But the one that happens in the snow just kind of presented itself. I was moving things around to try and make that section work and adding in that scare was the logical solution to make that encounter memorable. Honestly, what is more messed up than a horror game with no jump scares? So, there is one jump scare and a lot of people commented on it, which is great! One time it even got me when I was in my playthrough-testing trance.

There are a lot of endings to the game, and some of them end poorly. Mine did, but it still felt very satisfying and fitting. What led to that disaster, it seems, was picking poorly during the game's final choice, which itself was, in retrospect, a puzzle of sorts for the player to figure out. Can you talk about how you approached that, knowing a lot of people would pick wrong?
I think that the disaster ending is the one most people get when they first play through Mundaun. Even though it does kind of end badly, it’s probably my favourite ending. I like stories that end in an unexpected yet fitting way. That said, no ending is the “correct” one and the other ones have bad outcomes players want to avoid. Because of that, I was confident that people wouldn’t feel cheated. The story just ends slightly differently depending on your choices and I think each of them makes sense. What did you think would happen when you crossed that old man?! You were warned.

I want to follow up on this toilet thing. At one point, the game requires you to make a toilet stop before sleeping, but it's possible to use the toilet at different houses in the village. Does the game always assume you have a full bladder, or is that something the game is tracking over time?
You won’t let the toilet thing go, will you! Honestly, the game doesn’t track bladder level, which is quite an oversight, so you got me there. I guess it’s up to the player to only use the toilet in realistic intervals or intervals that feel right to them and their experience. This is the level of trust between designer and player that I wanted to cultivate.

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).