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Mulaka brings Indigenous Mexican mythology to life, with varying results

Mulaka captivated me with its low poly art and mythical atmosphere. I’m a sucker for good mythology, and the stories of the Tarahumara, the indigenous Mexican tribe the game draws from, are definitely cool in their own right. It’s a beautiful mix of the strange and familiar. Mulaka’s shamanistic quest has plenty of recognizable beats, but its in the particular of the beasts and people that you meet that it stands out. There’s a lot of cool illustrated scenes and fantastical set pieces. Even the loading screens felt like they had interesting stories to share.

The rest of the game doesn’t feel as directed. There’s plenty of open spaces that feel joyful to run around in, but the platforming feels strangely fussy. There were a few too many places that fell just out reach, leaving me to wonder if I was supposed to be somewhere else, or if the finicky platforming had sabotaged me.

The world communicates a sense of place well enough, but the landscape itself isn’t always clear in intent. Boundaries aren’t marked as well as they should be–more than a few times I’d get excited about the expansiveness of a space, only to run up against sand dune or cliff side that felt arbitrarily unpassable.

The combat has similar communication problems. There’s a good energy to the spear based fighting, and dealing with the right combination of enemies can be fun. But small problems keep it from building momentum. There’s a few enemies too small or too close in color to the environment to be picked out properly. Other enemies, like the flying mantises that fire homing projectiles, or the lost souls invincible without the use of the Sukuruame Vision–Mulaka’s take on the now ubiquitous detective vision–can be interesting to fight alone but are annoyances in a larger group. There’s also no way to lock onto a particular enemy, which might be less of a problem on PC with mouse control, but definitely felt missed on the PS4 version I played.

The aforementioned Sukuruame Vision also ends up feeling like a crutch. It allows you to see aspects of the world hidden to others, letting you communicate with the dead and, uh, tutorial stones. But because Mulaka doesn’t have a map it also acts as a compass. This is at once too much and too little information. Waypoints only float around the edges of the screen in a way that makes it hard to pinpoint an objective’s direction, but at the same time a lot of navigation problems could have be solved with level design that better guided you.

As unflattering as these problems sound, a lot of it were things I was willing to put up with to see the next story. Learning to channel the abilities of animals was a highlight, and being able to turn into, say, a woodpecker or bear was enough on its own, but seeing the ways they integrated into puzzles and boss fights really brought it home. Bizarre touches, like crafting aloe into a soul restoring remedy, or chia seeds into explosives, really amused me, even when they didn’t exactly feel smoothly integrated.

Whether or not Mulaka is an accurate or effective telling of Tarahumara culture isn’t for me to decide. But what I can say is that even if Mulaka feels uncertain in its construction, it carries a lot of the great atmosphere and color that good myths provide. And in that way it feels engaging, even when it’s not entirely successful.