Yesterday a friend gifted me a game called Mountain.

In this game, you look at a Mountain. Play some musical notes. And organise space junk collect on your sides. It's a non-game game, more of a toy, and yet I've racked up quite a few hours on it already.

Mountain is more of a tool to run in the background or second monitor. Something to jump into to take a break from other activities. While there are game like components to it for the case of achievements, it is more meditative and passive than active.

Time passes slowly and the camera zooms in and out, focused on the mountains core. You can take control and rotate and zoom yourself, if you do not wish to leave Mountain alone.

The QWERTY keyboard keys will play piano notes, though you will need to unlock the top row. Alas I can only do a bad rendition of Jingle Bells and the Tetris Theme. Fun to play around with though.

Playing a set of notes in a certain order can trigger events. Such as a different set of weather types, or opening up a status option.

One set of 5 keys will unleash the apocalypse. An dangerous item will spawn in space and drift towards the mountain. Unlike the junk you can collect, this will kill you.

Unless you can make Mountain cry out to prevent it.

What I've mainly found people doing is writing elaborate long posts on becoming Mountain. Which is cute, but not something I'm able to do myself. Check them out, plenty out there.

There's also the Mountain's thoughts. These change over Mountain's life. At the start, Mountain will question who it is. Before accepting that it is Mountain. And eventually questioning why it exists and when it will all end.

As a game, it is rather shallow, and only has the illusion of a lot of depth. But I like it as a toy. Put on some ambient music, lie back, and relax.

We sit together, the Mountain and I. Until only the Mountain remains.

Game Acquisition: Gifted by a friend.
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 1 July 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8
Processor: 1.7+ GHz or better
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Radeon HD5450 or better; 256 MB or higher
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 200 MB available space
Sound Card: 100% DirectX9.0c compatible sound card and drivers