Bramble: The Mountain King and the new wave of folk horror games

Folk horror, wrote author Adam Scovell, is the “evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods . . . and the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark, lonely water”. In plainer terms, it’s the sub-genre that pairs macabre stories with folkloric traditions, one that has reappeared on cinema screens in recent years (think Midsommar and The Green Knight), and which is now firmly taking root in video games.

Games are not the most natural bedfellow for material so grounded in the muck and grit of the earth. They are contingent on computer hardware built on systems of logic and maths, and must conjure every ounce of texture and atmosphere from the virtual ether.

Nevertheless, Bramble: The Mountain King is the latest title to draw from folk horror’s well, inspired, its makers say, by the childhood fairy tales of their native Sweden. Formally, it’s a game less of rules and objectives than of narrative and mood, whisking a young boy called Olle through a series of exquisitely rendered environments. At first, these are enticing, even comforting — a bucolic, moss-quilted forest, home to sweet-natured gnomes — before moving into increasingly gnarled and blood-soaked territory. The way these spaces shift before the player’s eyes evokes the surreal, hallucinatory quality of so much folk horror (see Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England). Playing out almost as an extended magic mushroom trip, the game understands the way landscape can exert a destabilising influence on the mind.

As you venture deeper into the forest, edging ever closer to the mountain, it becomes clear that Bramble isn’t just an ode to nature and the fertile paganism it inspires, but a cautionary tale about encroaching Christianity. It echoes the philosophical tension of The Witcher games, whose protagonist Geralt embodies another pillar of folk horror: enlightened rationalism. He may be a witcher (the franchise’s term for a monster slayer), but he is better thought of as a detective: a man of facts in a world whose senseless wars lay waste to common people, custom and the land they call home.

It’s a recurring motif of the genre that the rational protagonist tries to make sense of (and, in all likelihood, falls victim to) unknowable phenomena. Take Sgt Neil Howie, the policeman in the 1973 movie classic The Wicker Man, the unnamed, ever-observant wildlife volunteer in the recent film Enys Men or indeed Thomasina Bateman, the spunky heroine of last year’s point-and-click adventure The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. It’s Thomasina’s insatiable curiosity and her willingness to ask questions (and solve puzzles) where others don’t that leads to her downfall, changed forever by the mythic power that lies beneath the game’s moody pixel-art moors.

Like the actions of Thomasina, the best folk horror unburies images and ideas that have long lain dormant, as if unearthing a collective subconscious. First-person horror Mundaun (2021) and open-world horror adventure Saturnalia (2022) are games set in the mountains of Austria and coastal Sardinia respectively; both forgo the polished look of most modern games in favour of striking, pencil-etched styles. The screen seems to constantly flicker in each, breeding the kind of unease that stems from an inability to trust your own eyes. Where most modern games (even horror titles) opt for clarity, Mundaun and Saturnalia favour ambiguity. They are masterclasses in the art of disorientation, of making you feel like an outsider in their worlds.

As you explore each location, two stories of historic violence and their repercussions reveal themselves, thus highlighting another of folk horror’s calling cards: the tension between modernity and tradition. Mundaun and Saturnalia themselves mirror this tension as games that use cutting-edge technology to summon the ghastliest folklore. It seems there is no repressing the evil that lurks beneath the soil, digital or otherwise.

‘Bramble: The Mountain King’ is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X