Game: The Curse of Mount Madre
Genre: Indie, JRPG
System: PC (Steam Deck reviewed)
Developers|Publishers: Kevin Musto
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $9.99 | UK Game £8.50 | EU €9,75
Release Date: January 20th, 2025
With our genuine thanks to Kevin Musto for the review code
In a world that’s still coming out of a JRPG drought, it’s always a pleasure to witness people trying to keep the genre alive. Fans curate the old games, uplift the new, and even become creators in order to remind people what’s still really great about sitting down with a team full of varyingly skilled travelers and pushing through intricate worlds. The Curse of Mount Madre wears its two biggest inspirations on its sleeve as it makes its own effort to honor these turn-based gems: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart in one of the finest classic Westerns ever made, and Wild Arms, one of the few fantasy western games to nail its setting.
As a reviewer here, one of my favorite things to do is consider a game both in a professional and a more personal sense. In that respect, we’re going to be riding through some whiplash. The Curse of Mount Madre cannot stand up under professional scrutiny, and we’re going to go over its issues right away. But I also admire what’s been attempted here so strongly that I’m going to repeat, several times, that I don’t think those issues should stop creator Kevin Musto from moving on to another next game.
The Curse of the Curse of Mount Madre
There are several types of accessible home-brew RPG makers on the market, and the one running Mount Madre is Bakin, which allows for entry level 3D RPG making. I’ve never fussed with it, so I’m unsure of its full limits and capabilities beyond that it’s serving a different audience than the better known RPG Maker and its typically pure-pixel outputs. What it’s done for Mount Madre is to help a first-timer create a PSOne-style game that blends some pixel/voxel aesthetics with a fully 3D map, along with custom voice acting and character art. That’s not nothing!

The game starts up fine and supports Steam Deck and other controllers natively, also a good lesson to nail out the gate. But the limitations of an introductory attempt hit pretty fast. It’s tough to build a cohesive, attractive 3D town without a lot of practice, so the Badlands and its central town, Liberty Valley, are made up of huge, spread-out sections without a lot of visual interest to tie it all together. Each screen space will functionally have one building, with nary a cactus, and the cemetery, a badlands staple, can’t be interacted with. This is where you hide your sketchy puns and the name of the neighbor everyone hates!
Moving from block to block (or screen to screen) is also sluggish, and pushing your party to hard edges of the map causes some weird tank-control style slow motion until they’re back on track. The menus are template JRPG style (if you’ve seen a classic Dragon Quest menu, you know it), which is fine in this situation. The encounter rate is set pretty darn high and combat, especially with your initial set-up, is slow. It’s overall not that fun to play, and not nice to look at, a game that can’t hold up against peers with more money, practice, and programmers. But, she states with an emphatic pause. But!

The High Value of Effort and Passion
Musto went into making this game with an idea and a plan to execute it. Along the way, he brought in a professional musician for a soundtrack and contracted a professional digital artist for the character portraits. He made great decisions here, which created a cohesive style for the Western fantasy he had in mind. That is something I’ve seen larger studios screw up, and the art, especially, is perfect for its characters. The obligatory elder prospector is so dwarf-coded in style that it adds layers to who he could’ve been, and Billie has a fox-like look that helps to show she has the brain cells these lads need to survive.

The voice acting is chewy to listen to, recorded with a bit of a hollow that hints at a home-grown job. Here again, I heard far worse in the ‘90s when games were just starting to get voice acting, and there’s a sense the team is having fun. It carries the story, which is workmanlike but cohesively told, into something that genuinely feels like a bunch of buddies having a good time trying to make something. In that, they succeeded, and I have nothing but good things to say about their efforts here.
Conclusion
As a game that’s the result of someone’s first time out the gate, look, set down the critical aggregate numbers and don’t think about Ubisoft for a moment. The Curse of Mount Madre is flawed. It’s messy. I can’t in good faith recommend this as a polished project, and I had a hard time putting more than an hour into my playtime. But this is a game that shows off how someone did the right things in learning how to produce a game, how to tell a story, and how to uplift the work other people did in helping the project get off the ground.
If this is a first time effort, I want someone to give Kevin a Unity key and an open inbox to ask questions on how to improve the in-world navigation and design next time out. At the very least, it looks like the Bakin program has a robust community with tons to learn about. The game he’s made may not meet general professional standards, but as a living lesson plan, I love what he tried to do and I hope he keeps at it.
My final thumb score is not a reflection of negativity or confusion in this case, but a combined assessment as a reviewer and a big cheer as a fan of both the JRPG genre and new creators showing off what they’ve already learned to do. Keep at it, Kevin Musto. I think you’ve got the will to work up your skills.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure
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