Mountain

Mountain is David OReilly's existential nature simulation. After answering a few opening questions with simple drawings, you are given a mountain to watch. The mountain exists. It rotates. Weather happens. Day and night cycle. Things grow on it. Things die on it. Trees fall, rocks accumulate, the seasons turn, the cosmos passes overhead, occasionally large objects drop onto it from somewhere unspecified.

The game runs while your computer is open, occupying a window in the background or fullscreen, and time genuinely moves forward. There are no levels, no quests, no DLC, no failure state. The mountain has thoughts that occasionally surface as text. Players sometimes type a single note on the keyboard to play a tone. Mostly you simply observe the mountain being a mountain.

MOUNTAIN 2.0 added refinements to the simulation without changing its character. Reviewers described it variously as an existential nightmare, a meditative tool, a sad geological vignette, and the most uplifting game they'd played that month. All of those descriptions are correct.