edit to this one - sorry, forgot to blur a puzzle spoiler!
The Curse (Rob)
Played on: 9th Sept (downloaded on 3rd Sept)
How I played it: Download version on Windows
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins to reach a winning ending with 18 points
I remember Rob’s Radicofani from a previous comp quite fondly, warts and all, so I was pleased to get a new game by him in the personal shuffle. The Curse is a text adventure adapted from a project from the 80s, and it very much feels of a piece with the kinds of adventures Jason Dyer’s been showcasing. A cartoonish Ancient Egyptian pyramid is a classic adventure setting, filled with two of the things 80s designers loved the most, puzzles and deathtraps.
Actually, let me back up. The premise of The Curse is that you’re Cronoboy(?), a secret agent whose work has dried up after the Cold War (although that doesn’t really factor into events), sent to rescue the ambassador’s daughter from a sorcerer. Your plane crashes near a pyramid, and you start the game wandering the desert. Also, you get a phone call in the first two minutes to tell you the sorcerer is dead? It’s a cheerfully bonkers premise which feels like it’s been cobbled together out of different parts.
That’s a bit of a theme, actually. The Curse often feels like a grab-bag of disparate ideas, enthusiastically presented, as if it’s been stitched together from scraps of other projects. It’s charming but also kind of bewildering. There’s a mid-game section where the action moves to a cave and abandoned house, which doesn’t feel like it belongs with the rest of the setting. Neither does the fog set-piece in the early game, although I enjoyed that section’s atmosphere. Odd easter eggs abound – I liked the one which changes your name to “nobody”, I think that’s a funny prank to pull on the player. The game bounces between eerie horror-ish trappings and goofy jokes and references like this, and it’s fun but it’s not quite cohesive.
As with a lot of 80s adventures, the puzzle solutions are more associative than logical. It may not be clued what you need to do, and it may not be in-character for your in-game avatar to do it, but theoretically you can find the solution by experimenting with verbs that make sense in context. For example, I got stuck for a long time figuring out what to do with the altar, and eventually resorted to hints. You need to kneel at it and pray in order to receive an item. I don’t think there’s anything in the game which nudges you to do this or tells you that that particular item is hidden at the altar. But then again, what else are altars for? There’s a scoring system where you gain points for solving puzzles and lose them for resorting to hints. There’s a target score of 30 which I think is doable for a first-time player with enough experience and patience, but I ended with 18. Part of that point loss is an unfortunate bug in the Sphinx room, where the Help command doesn’t print a hint but decreases your score anyway.
Mentioning that bug makes me realise I’ve skipped over the game engine here. The Curse is written in a custom engine which I believe is the same as Radicofani. The text parser itself is spotty but not unmanageable – it misses a lot of verbs and nouns you’d like to use, but there’s an in-game set of instructions which lets you know what The Curse is expecting, so I wasn’t significantly hung up by guess-the-verb issues. There was one error message in Italian (I didn’t write down where I found it, sorry – it said “RUOTA% RIMANE A ZERO”), but the rest of the translation is serviceable, and I probably wasn’t supposed to see that message anyway.
The presentation is what makes the engine interesting. As with Radicofani, the game pops up all sorts of different windows which can be a pain to close manually, but which also lets it display art and styled text in interesting ways, and allows a few pop-up surprises. I enjoy this, but I have to say, I’m puzzled by some of the art choices. Some of it is Egyptian-themed stock photography, which is all well and good, but much of the rest is… weirdly nightmarish. Spidery legs erupting out of children, that kind of thing. Again, it feels like it belongs to a different game than The Curse, as if it’s been repurposed from some other scrapped project.
I feel like this will occupy the same spot in my heart as Radicofani. The Curse has a lot of rough edges, but it feels like it was a lot of fun to put together, and it’s unashamedly old-school, and it’s a lot of fun to take on its own terms like that.