The journey, rather than the destination, is the focus of Mundaun–the reasons you take it and the travel required to reach its conclusion. In this way, it feels like a spiritual successor to Half-Life 2’s Highway 17, a mid-game chapter that finds crowbar-toting protagonist Gordon Freeman traveling by buggy along the lonely coast. It’s a lengthy, melancholy section of the 2004 shooter where the driving is occasionally interrupted by combat, puzzles, and on-foot exploration. Mundaun is like Highway 17 expanded to a full 10-hour experience. In your journey to the mountaintop, you sit passively in a bus, drive a hay-baling truck along bumpy terrain, and ride a sled across quiet alpine slopes. You’re guided through a series of dark, labyrinthine tunnels by a trolley car the size of a toaster. You ride a chair lift. The inclusion of vehicles might not sound noteworthy on its own, but traversing the mountain in all these different ways–on foot, by sled, by truck–has the effect of making the mountain feel like a real place; a peak that must be considered to be conquered. You don’t cover dozens of virtual miles in your quest, but Mundaun feels like a journey nonetheless–personal and physical–as a result of this fixation on the vehicles we use to make our pilgrimages.