What happens when every action roguelike game focuses on upgrades? Well, perhaps thinking about downgrades is the way to stand out… Welcome to Curse Rounds, a 1-bit aesthetic-inspired action roguelike where instead of choosing your upgrade, you choose which curse to take on into the next round of action. It is a novel and fresh approach to the genre that works incredibly well. Choosing the lesser of two evils is sometimes a painful and stressful experience, but it’s always a meaningful one.
With curses being the big selling point, let’s start there. Curse Rounds has over 60 curse cards, and after each round, two are selected at random for the player to choose between. Some are enemy-focused and buff their health, speed, damage, or spawn rate. Some cards increase the rate at which tougher enemies appear. Quite a few cards relate to what happens if you get hit and lose a life, often cloning enemies that hurt you (which is a simple evil until it happens later in the game when there’s more going on). Other cards chop your health in half. The most annoying for me was causing the screen to shake every time a gun was fired. Depending on your play style and how far you have got in your run, different options will appeal more to you, and that variation is Curse Rounds’ biggest strength.
Variation carries through into level design, too. Each single-screen map is procedurally generated, although they follow very similar patterns and themes. Every few rounds, a boss battle will occur, and even the bosses are selected in random rotation. Bosses are odd in Curse Rounds, as they are often the easiest parts of the game, so long as you’ve got the dash ability nailed down. Each boss killed provides a blessing which is treated like an upgrade to choose from, but that’s the only choice you’ll get about how you improve as a character. At the end of each round, a washing machine appears and spits out a power-up for attack damage, fire rate, or movement speed. The changes are quite minimal, though.
I love the 1-bit art style, and it largely works in Curse Rounds’ favour. What sometimes doesn’t is the camera angle. As there is a slight isometric view to the game, when the map gets busy (especially if you collect a missile weapon), sometimes, where bullets or missiles fire and what they hit don’t seem to line up correctly. The isometric view makes aerea of effect explosions difficult to gauge, too, resulting in you being hurt for something you feel like you’ve escaped. Initially, this was just a minor problem, but the deeper into a run you go, the more every hit matters. There is nothing worse than having a curse sap your health, and then you die because you felt the viewpoint tricked you into safety.
Thankfully, the moment-to-moment gameplay, whilst simple, is fluid and consistent outside of that issue. Your character can move, shoot, and dash (being invincible during the dash). That’s it. Whilst you can pick up some weapons on the battlefield, it’s all down to skilful aiming, shooting, and dodging. Different enemies will attack in packs or hide as rocks and fauna before coming after you. Some chase you around the screen. Others have a line-of-sight laser attack, which you can dodge or hide behind objects to miss. Through careful management of where you run, you can control how many enemies are activated at once and mitigate some of the riskier parts of the battle. Keeping your cool is easier said than done when you’ve got enemies spawning right next to you with giant attack ranges, though! It never quite reaches fever-pitch action roguelike status because it doesn’t pitch its difficulty curve that way. Instead, your curses cause the difficulty to change. If you die on a single hit, it’ll force you to be careful, whereas if enemies are cloning all of the place, you’ll want to be guns blazing.
Whilst it doesn’t quite pack a top-tier punch, Curse Rounds does stand out for its replayability and curse gameplay loop. As everything is shuffled every time, each run genuinely plays out differently. A run can be completed in half an hour easily, so that means replayability and trying out different curse setups is where the longevity comes from. If you don’t like mouse and keyboard controls for aiming, grab the console port. For some reason, the PC version I own does not support a controller, but the recent console ports obviously do. Fun and worth a look for the “pick your poison” gameplay.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
