A game in which your main form of attack is prayer, this is the first horror game inspired by the Buddhist religion.

As protagonist Eric Simmons, the player must climb to the peak of Chomolonzo, a fictional mountain in the Himalayas, to locate his missing brother. Along the route he’ll find that the settlements and temples have been abandoned and are now inhabited by ghosts of the villagers, trapped in limbo between the mortal world and the afterlife. Simmons can then either destroy the ghosts or free their souls and gain a health boost as a reward.

Executions (or should that be exorcisms?) are performed with Simmon’s main weapon, a magical staff that can be used to strike the enemies or fire a projectile, using the Wii Remote’s pointer to aim. If you want to free the ghost’s soul, which is advisable given the rate at which you lose health, you need to soften them up with the staff then perform a prayer move.

Activated by following a series of on-screen gesture prompts, the prayers are designed to mimic the expressive movements of real-life Buddhist worshipping practices while also creating a gameplay experience less tense and subdued than the typical survival-horror play style.

In practice, the work-in-progress build of the game definitely achieves this goal, but with only two or three gestures currently on display there’s a risk that the gimmick could wear thin with time. And while we assume that the addition of MotionPlus controls would compensate for this issue, the producers at Deep Silver have not yet decided whether such an addition, so late in development, fits in with their plans.

With only a few short months to go before Cursed Mountain is released, the developers are currently iterating on the near-finished product. Focus tests are taking place in order to fine-tune the difficulty level, which is currently pitched quite high, and to generally perfect the pace of the game.

After a brief hands-on session, however, we have to admit that some of our reservations cannot be addressed by mere tweaking. Outside the battles, the abandoned houses and farms of the mountain make for seemingly uneventful periods of gameplay, while the simple cut-scenes, told through still imagery alone, drain the narrative of its potential drama.

Such doubts aside, it’s encouraging to see an original survival-horror game on Wii and we sincerely hope that Deep Silver can polish up Cursed Mountain enough to deliver a game as fun as it is original.