Curse: The Eye of Isis – 18 Years Later |

Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive

Developer: Asylum Entertainment

Release Date: 12/08/2003

Available On

Curse is the most deceptive video game cover I’ve ever seen. It looks freaking scary and is a damn excellent cover. It’s also a pretty rare game on Xbox, one of the more expensive ones in the library. With the subject matter being a survival horror game, I had to add it to my collection. I didn’t do much research for the game. When I finally got a copy and booted it up, I stared at my screen. “Oh,” With a blank stare, I flatly exclaimed. It’s one of “those” survival “horror” games. It’s essentially an Alone in the Dark clone. It’s no more scary than a Goosebumps TV show. The beginning cut scene doesn’t invoke much hope, and neither do the production values.

So, you play as a man-woman duo, Darien and Victoria. You only play as Victoria a few times in the game, but you are mostly Darien. The game is set in late 19th-century England. The two protagonists are American, but everyone else seems British minus Abdul. The hijinks here end up becoming 19th-century Night at the Museum. Darien’s childhood friend Victoria invites him to a British museum when an artifact is stolen, the titular Isis statue, by a thief named sigh Le Chat. His avatar is a person in a black ninja-type costume that shoots crossbow bolts. You end up chasing this character through the game. The story is completely uninteresting and fails to develop at all. In the entire game, you are simply chasing down the Eye of Isis to return it to its rightful place and prevent a “curse” from spreading. It’s a yellow mist that turns people into zombies. Yeah, it’s not fascinating at all.

The lack of scary monsters contributes to the overall uninteresting nature of the game. The two monsters are equally frightening. You get zombies from the regular humans you fight, who are British dudes with shotguns and mummies. Totally not scary one bit. The zombies have open chests that shoot out a tentacle at you or spray yellow mist out of their mouths, which can raise a meter on the screen that slowly drains, but this also will drain your health. The enemies are surprisingly easy to dodge thanks to the also unexpectedly good lock-on combat system. I didn’t hate the combat in this game. You can circle strafe around everyone and avoid most damage pretty easily. A yellow reticle will slowly shrink down to a dot, which is your accuracy meter. There are only a couple of weapons in the game. The available weapons in the game include a revolver, shotgun, crossbow, rifle, mortar, and flamethrower. The revolver and rifle share the same bullets, and the flamethrower needs canister fuel refilled at oil stations.

Bosses are the least fun to fight in this game due to the cramped areas you are in. These bosses are big, and you just don’t get enough room to move around. The first big boss isn’t so bad, but you need to wait for vulnerable moments. You should stay constantly locked on, and as soon as the yellow reticle pops up, it indicates that it’s okay to shoot. I didn’t realize this during the first fight with two bears and wasted tons of ammo. Another fight against a giant bull requires you to move a meat hook and pick it up crane-game style with three button presses, but the bull needs to be in the exact spot, and mine glitched by just randomly cutting to the meat hook being attached when the bull wasn’t anywhere near the hook. There are quite a few glitches in this game. It’s incredibly unpolished.

Inventory management can break your game permanently if you’re not careful. You can swap inventory items between the two characters or give them to Abdul, who is your only save station. Abdul will follow you around and appear at key moments, allowing you to save frequently. However, if you give an item like a weapon to a character, they will disappear for a good chunk of the game, and you can end up with no weapons or ammo. I also ran into a glitch where the flamethrower fuel canisters kept multiplying in my inventory, and there’s no drop button. I had to give five to Abdul and not touch the canister that said x99. If I had kept going, I would have locked my game up. I had one issue where I gave all my weapons to Victoria, but she disappeared, and I was swapped back to Darien with no weapons or ammo. I had to reload my save and not do that again. It would be nice if each character had their weapons or could find their own during their parts of the story. Inventory management is seriously broken here.

With that said, the game is incredibly mediocre. This is a must-play with a guide, as the level design is atrocious. The maze-like levels and awful map system don’t help. The map has zero labels outside of slight shading on doors that you can’t open, but these constantly change. It’s a way for the developers to lazily guide you around. Every door will be locked except the one you need to go to. What’s the point of large areas with many rooms if everything is locked and unlocked based on what’s happening? I also encountered issues with ladders that glitched and required the character to be placed in an exact position before they could be activated. Puzzles are obtuse with badly placed camera angles, making it difficult to see symbols and objects. The two available written guides exhibit poor quality, lacking warnings about weapon selection and descriptions of boss fights. For the final boss, one guide advises, “I won’t spoil how to fight the boss, but just beat it like the last one.” That’s not helpful at all.

Overall, Curse is an awful-looking, mediocre game that isn’t scary. Only two enemy types, broken inventory that can lock your game up, terrible and dated visuals, an uninteresting story, and bad camera and level design with uninteresting characters. Even the sound design and music are just bad. Why does walking on sand sound like squeaky rubber? At least the voice acting is good.