14 DAY TRIAL // I have talked about Cursed Mountain just a while ago and it seemed to be quite impressive. Today, the game was officially announced by Sproing Interactive and Deep Silver and the companies also decided to offer some more information about the title - including a very general release date (sometime in 2009).
In the game, the player takes on the role of a fearless mountaineer as he climbs the Himalayas on a quest to find his lost brother but as he goes deeper into the mountains, he encounters an ancient curse: the souls of the people who died in that region are stuck in limbo, caught in the Shadow World. Of course, he has to face them, fight against them and survive the tons of horror scenes that await.
"Aside from the challenge to develop an innovative title with spectacular levels and new controls, the focus in Cursed Mountain is the overwhelming environment of the Himalayas," said Harald Riegler, CEO of Sproing. "It is really important to us that the player experiences nature's powers as realistically as possible, and that the game's viewing distance allows the player to see the monumental landscapes at all times. We are also going to great lengths to make the dead souls look as convincing as possible in order to deliver the level of immersion necessary for really effective and believable survival horror."
In order to deliver on these goals, the developers have created a game engine (called Athena), which they say is rendering the Himalayas at a quality never seen before on the Wii (which means that it is even better than the eye-candy The Conduit). Here are just a few of the things that the engine can do: HDR-Rendering, shader simulations developed especially for Wii in order to display ice, heat and water (realistic reflections and refractions), an ultra-fast particle system for amazing snow storms, soft particles for realistic fog and smoke, depth of field, motion blur, dynamic soft shadows, spherical harmonics lighting, as well as a high performance level-of-detail and streaming system in order to provide long viewing distance of the surroundings. And people used to believe that Nintendo's console can't do such advanced things! It seems it does and all we can say is that we're hoping to see the game released as soon as possible.