The Curse

This is a windows executable game in a custom system. It runs in the command line but also has pop-up windows with html-style formatting for things like hints and pictures.

It describes itself as an old-school 80’s type game with minimal story and mostly puzzles, several of them timed.

The idea is that you are on a mission to help rescue a kidnapped girl but your plane crashes near a pyramid and you find out the kidnapper, a shaman, died and the girl has disappeared.

The game is ultra-minimalistic in text. For instance, the description of the first room is:

You are in the desert.
So from here I can go north south or east.

I see the plane.

Wandering around, there are several interesting things, like a foggy area called 'Perdition" and a strange altar.

I had some trouble with the parser. Early on, I was trying to answer the phone, and I had the following exchange:

I see the plane
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> answer call
Ok.
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> i
You Own:
a mobile phone
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> x phone
Let’s see…
Incoming call 0331785692
What now Me?
> push answer
But… the cell phone isn’t ringing
What now Me?

My character’s name was Me because the way the game asked for my name was:

Are you the chosen one?
Who knocks at this door?

and I answered ‘Me’.

Sometimes when I got an error in the game, no matter what my next move was, the error would repeat. For instance:

> x mantle
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
> go in house
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
>

There is a help system, that first gives your a kind of riddle hint and then an explicit action. In many places, the only hint is a picture of a mummified hand and the phrase “Do you want a hand? Not now…;-)”. In others it’s more explicit. The hints often refer to things that aren’t in the room description, like walls.

I was able to get into a house with drawings in it, and the hints include a picture with a reversed message, but at that point I got stuck. I’d be happy to try again with a full walkthrough, or if anyone else can get past that point.

The best parts of this game were the cool audio messages and the very nice drawings; very nice additions for a custom command line parser!

While I am giving a 1-star vote at this time, I don't think the game is horrible. It's just that my criteria are:
polish (where the game could use some more commands it understands),
interactivity (where I was lost on what to do a lot),
descriptiveness (the game uses a minimalist style),
emotional impact (which I do think is good and is worth a star with the cool pictures), and
would I play again? (and right now I do not feel that way).

I'd be happy to bump it up one star if the author requests it, but right now those are my feelings.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a throwback game. No, not that. This is a PULL-FORWARD game, updating and modernizing a game from the Wild West days of parsers when there were no rules, no deep descriptions, no thought of player experience, just raw creativity and world building and throwing gameplay at the wall to see what sticks. I have seen a few of these now, and pretty uniformly I have had two reactions to all of them:

1. How cool is it that this can be resurrected? This author is doing vital work!
2. Wow, the old days were WAY LESS ROSE COLORED than I remember.

I infer, from my brief experience with this game, that the modern efforts amounted to window management, graphics, sound, and a help system. The underlying gameplay seems to be left as is. Let’s start with the modern elements. The sound design was a pleasant surprise for me. It was atmospheric but spare, pairing quite well with the spare text of its interface. The use of color in text to delineate different classes of feedback was also a nice touch I don’t often see. The graphic design I was less enamored of. The work popped up graphic windows in first-time locations to orient you. On my monitor, those windows were BIG, and crowded each other, including the play space. Occasionally, transition or cutscene text was ALSO presented in windows, so I inevitably had a few open at any given time, without much play value. This was not appealing, but the biggest thing I wished for was a consistent graphic palette. There were attractive cartoonish people, 8-bit pyramids, high-res threatening eyes and photo realistic fog. There didn’t seem to be much esthetic unity and it really presented a patchwork interface.

I’ll get back to the new HELP system at a dramatically appropriate time, let’s cycle to gameplay.

When I complain about my self-imposed scoring system, I am almost always complaining about the top of the scale: determining when a work is “Transcendent.” I actually have a bigger problem lurking in that rubric. When is a game “Unplayable?” “Bouncy” is easy to identify - I recoil at the artistic statement or conceits. That’s visceral. “Unplayable” though, who am I to determine that? Unplayable by ME certainly, but where is the line between my shortcomings and a work’s faults? Legal scholars have been gifted a phrase by US (Supreme Court) Justice Potter Stewart, who when ruling on obscenity said [para] “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” This bon mot is kind of unhelpful when working with cases close to the boundary, but that is not where we are with The Curse.

Nevermind its spare descriptions. Nevermind its limited area populations. There are maybe 9 locations (it’s grey if you go south), and vanishingly little to do, and absoLUTELY no signposts on how to ungate progress. Plenty of ways to die though! No, not actually true. Three ways to die, but SO MANY INSTANCES OF THOSE! This is the deepest hell of “>search X” “you find nothing” “>move X” “You find something!” I knocked about those nine areas for a full hour, dying innumerable times. Worse, in one area, I found a scoring move that I could not recreate! After trying SO MANY TIMES.

I tried everything I could think of, many many times, and got nothing new. So naturally I turned to HELP, the modern addition, to smooth things over for me. Not only was the most common answer “no help here,” an uncommon answer was a flashed graphic that meant nothing to me! Actually not nothing, it appeared to be openly mocking me by offering a (Spoiler - click to show)‘helping hand’ that provided no help. Making matters worse, consulting help PENALIZED my score, deducting points for consulting it! Fair play if I was getting actionable information. But for points that were SO HARD to secure, in exchange for mocking unhelp?? Infuriating.

I can’t say I truly ragequit. The clear labor of love of it prevented that level of ire, and in fact provided Sparks of Joy that this would be anyone's White Whale. Even the patchwork graphics have a charm of authorship to them. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out its weird, fun fascination with classic Rock. But as a gameplay experience for sure I was left with “glad this was rewarding for you author! I’m done.” It does feel weird to flag as “Unplayable” a work that was clearly developed and released and presumably found players decades ago. Who am I to tell them they couldn’t play this thing? I can’t speak to any of that, but against my ingrained expectations, fully informed by today’s IF norms, that’s where this lands for me.

Played: 10/10/24
Playtime: 1hr, gave up, double digit deaths, score 7/40? with another 5 I could not reclaim after an unsaved death
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Unplayable
Would Play Again?: Oh my, no

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

(Spoilers ahoy; this is one to play blind, I think, and it may be worth trying even if the old-school presentation might initially put you off since the game is shorter, easier, and stranger than you think).

So here’s a Rorschach test for you: get a friend – or actually just an acquaintance is fine – get a TV, get a Battlestar Galactica boxed set, then plop the one down in front of the other while you put on the last and make them watch all the way through the first three seasons (these aren’t your sleek modern 8-episode seasons, mind, we’re talking 50-odd 42 minute episodes so hopefully you’ve built in some bathroom breaks). At the close of the third-season finale, I guarantee that they will turn to you and say “what the hell did I just watch?” – but some of them will say that with incomprehension and disgust, and others with giddy wonder (Spoiler - click to show)(the specific moment I’m thinking of here is of course the part where five characters who obviously can’t be Cylons turn out to be Cylons and start singing All Along the Watchtower, despite none of that making any fucking sense).

I am team giddy wonder so I think I love the Curse, despite being fully aware that this opinion is probably indefensible. The first three quarters of my notes for the game consist of multiple variations of the question “what the hell am I playing here”: this is an 80s-throwback parser game that disorients the player with multiple pop-up windows that are meant to be read in a specific order, a parser that asks a bunch of rhetorical questions except for the ones that aren’t rhetorical, awkwardly timed text, and a backstory that sounds like your stoned friend fell asleep during an Indiana Jones movie, half-awoke during a James Bond marathon, and then attempted to reconstruct the dream they had for you: seriously, you’re a superspy who’s been made redundant by the end of the Cold War, so now you do freelance work and you’ve been called in to rescue a kidnapped woman, who’s been taken to a pyramid by a sorcerer named Shamir, except he died during the abduction attempt, but not before putting a curse on a village, though there’s no village around…

One plane crash later, you’re dumped into a trackless desert and turned loose to explore. This part of the game presents itself as a reasonably straightforward throwback text adventure – there aren’t many objects implemented, nor are there a ton of locations, so moving from place to place trying to few available actions feels natural enough. There are some neat touches, like attractive graphics and Easter Eggs referencing classic rock, and some frustrations, notably a parser that frequently seems to just break. Witness this exchange:

> unlock panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

> open panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

Oh, and I got a parser error the first time I tried to push the button on the panel, but was able to try to activate it the second time I made the attempt.

Frustration mounted as I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get into the door-free pyramid, or get through a fog-clouded maze section, or what to do at a mysterious altar in the middle of the dunes. Fortunately, there’s a HINT function that prodded me in the right direction: I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)PRAY by the altar, which has a certain sense to it now that I type it out but sure felt like a reach at the time. That led to a new sequence with a couple once-again-buggy objects that I couldn’t quite figure out how to interact with, but as I was flailing around with the parser again I noticed some confounding new text showing up whenever I tried anything:

Will and Pat have never met.

What now Nobody?

Events progress linearly from there, I think regardless of what you do (I certainly didn’t feel like I accomplished much from that point on), and when I realized what was happening my jaw dropped just like it did when I watched that episode of Galactica more years ago than I care to count: (Spoiler - click to show)as best I can tell, the ghost of Shamir escapes you by going back in time and preventing Will Crowther from ever meeting his wife, so that he never spelunks, gets depressed during his divorce, and writes Adventure to try to connect with his kids – meaning that there’s never any such thing as a text adventure, and you, as a text adventure protagonist, go poof.

I’ve been reduced to giving the play by play here because I’m not sure how else to communicate the sheer bonkers-ness of the scenario; there are no shortage of metafictional joke games in IF, of course – heck, I’ve already hit at least one in this year’s Comp – but the ambition of this gag, and the way it’s slow-played by hiding under a reasonable-sized chunk of an authentically kinda-broken custom parser game, really make it stand out as something special. I’m not sure it really stands up to scrutiny; the logic behind the twist is paper-thin and requires some reconstruction even to minimally make sense, and surely the process of getting to the good part could have been made slightly less painful. But look, a thing can be too ridiculous to work and then somehow at least kinda work regardless, and in this case my only possible response is to applaud the audacity (and think about a Galactica rewatch…)

Postscript: when I first posted this review to the IntFic forum, it had a caveat where I said something like “maybe this is just a bad end and I missed the whole game”, but I deleted that before finalizing because how could an author include a twist like this without it being the point of the game? Then I read other reviews, and was delighted to learn that I was wrong and this isn’t actually meant as an Infidel-style deconstruction of IF, but actually is just the retro puzzle adventure it appears to be with a throwaway gag midway through. This makes the whole thing even funnier to me; everyone else is welcome to their flute and their mirror and their Anubis and whatever other stuff they got hung up on; I am content with my memories of the time I retroactively destroyed IF.