One month after two brothers disappear in the Monongahela Forest, the lone survivor of the pair emerges starving, disoriented, and traumatized. While attempting to re-establish a normal life, the harrowing events from the woods continue to haunt him–and his darkest secret threatens to turn him into the very monster he believed he had fled.
What was the last podcast you listened to with zero narration? Every ensemble thing I’ve caught has a talk radio mockumentary angle, or a found footage podcast format, or cassette accumulating archivists… just some kind of way to convey more to the audience than the characters themselves are aware of in the moment. There was an curmudgeonly “what’s the deal with” kinda post on r/audiodrama recently, bemoaning this tendency with a smattering of all caps, wondering if podcasting’s propensity for meta formats might be symptomatic of millennial sensitivity and self-absorption. I think the answer’s a little more prosaic: in a story without visuals or narration the soundtrack and dialogue have to do a lot of heavy lifting.
Mordeo is all about this, and leans into a conversational style that’s dripping with exposition and buttery foreshadowing. It’s an endearingly earnest and undeniably effective approach to storytelling. Propulsive even it’s quieter moments, and managing to fit a lot of detail into a pretty lean episode count. It took a minute to ease myself into that slightly Hallmark, slightly Resident Evil style of loaded dialogue, but I was fully onboard after about half an episode. Sticking with this one.
You can find a trailer and the first couple of episodes here.