Okay maybe this wasn’t the game for me, I don’t have much experience of rougelikes beyond slightly enjoying, but never completing 2021’s Returnal. The concept of losing everything after dying once and having to battle my way back through repetitive procedurally rooms of the same enemies from square one may appeal to the masochists among you, and the gaming population is certainly full of those, but personally leaves me feeling like Sisyphus watching the boulder roll back down the mountain.
Now I’ve heard nothing but great things about other games in this genre such as Binding of Isaac and 2020’s GOTY winner Hades, both of which are on my (embarrassingly) large play list and maybe one day I’ll go back and finish Returnal, but from what I’ve seen of them, these games have style, narratives and themes going for them. So what does Curse Rounds offer?
My eyes betray me.
I’ll start with the good, actually no, to be fair, the VERY good; I really dig this game’s aesthetic. Composed of monochrome, pixelated doodles, great care has definitely been put into how the game looks. Its sprites, admittedly basic, come alive thanks to fantastic animation work and every one of its, admittedly impressive, list of enemies all behave uniquely. The same can be said of its sound design, a simple retro throw back of pixelated tunes and crunchy sound effects, a tribute to those vintage PC games of yore. What little there is of a story is told through very nice comic book panels; rough and sketchy. Oh and if the black and white contrast is too harsh for you, there is an option in the settings to switch to a much less striking greyscale palette, an excellent consideration.
But then there are moments where it just becomes almost too much. In more intense rooms where enemies become comically frequent, it becomes a cacophony of visual noise, your tiny player character getting lost in the chaos of it all. Some of the game’s curse cards (I’ll get to that in a second) cause visual drawbacks such as screen shakes and pixelated rain to constantly fall from the sky, further muddying the playfield. It’s a fun difficulty curve, I’ll give them that, and your tolerance may vary, but there were points where it gave me genuine motion sickness. I don’t recommend playing this game on a gigantic modern TV either, not only because of the input lag (is this a bad time to talk about how terrible modern telly’s are for gaming?) but simply because your eyes won’t be able to track the chaos of what’s going on. This is a monitor game, requiring you to sit forward at a desk in front of a smaller screen (or handheld) and do what I believe the kids nowadays refer to as locking in.
I never curse, I swear.
Now we get on to the namesake of Curse Rounds: the curses. Between rooms you are given the option of two cards, each condemning you to carry a debuff that will follow through your entire run; by the end you will have gained a whole stack of contrasting effects. As aftermentioned some of these are visual and others mechanical, the floor now being slippery ice or causing enemies to rise up as unkillable ghosts. To balance it out, after clearing a room you are given a small permanent buff to your weapon damage or movement speed, and after a boss you are given a very welcome power card that will provide a positive effect. It’s all random and leads to a lot of unique combinations, with the store page going as far as to declare “No two runs are the same!”. Huh.
Mechanically, it plays fine. Just fine. The player character feels responsive enough and you are given a nice dash with very generous i-frames. Enemies are incredibly varied and I’m sure time can be sunk into learning their behaviours and attack patterns. The base weapon, apparently a flashlight, shoots slow moving pellets that just kinda graze the enemies with no real oomf. I don’t feel like I’m giving that much damage, there’s not enough visual or aural feedback here for it to feel satisfying for me. Likewise the power ups (one of the three selling points on the store page) bounce between being actually useful and kinda lame, leading me to just avoid them and stick to the base pea shooter. Sure, there are some cool boss battles, but they vary from very brief to just cluttering the screen with noise, and I just felt a level of detachment to it all.
Speaking of detachment, the story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the gameplay. A child playing video games in the dead of night hears knocking coming from his attic; grabbing a flashlight to investigate, the trapdoor bursts open and a swarm of tentacles grabs the boy, dragging him inside. Then he gets turned into a little white ghost (I think?) and has to defeat swarms of ghosts/monsters/whatever in the same empty black room. Look I get this is appealing to a crowd that likes simple no nonsense stories, but what does it have to do with the gameplay loop? I’m not asking for Baldur’s Gate here, but I want some kind of incentive that leads to a payoff. A run will only take you about 25 ish mins and then you are treated to a dozen comic panels that don’t conclude anything. Fantastic. I’m biased of course, I studied film/theatre/TV writing and the written word is my comfort zone; I do like a narrative to keep me going.
“I said, maybe” – Noel Gallagher
Curse Rounds is a somewhat difficult, repetitive time killer with more in common with the coin gobbling arcade cabinets of yesteryear. It’s very cheap (£3/$4) but on modern store fronts that constantly host much deeper games for a similar price point, it feels like an iPhone game in comparison. There’s a good foundation here, very nice visuals and solid game feel and I can see the retro loving crowd getting more out of it, particularly those on Switch and PC (it played okay on controller, but I feel the aiming mechanics were designed with keyboard and mouse in mind). Maybe I’m too young, maybe I’m too impatient, maybe I’m too much of a wannabe film bro and maybe my astigmatism didn’t agree with how many objects were on screen (I should get my prescription checked). But perhaps the biggest maybe, is that one day I’ll find a rougelike that makes me want to roll the boulder back up the hill.
