Roguelikes are having a moment. It’s hard to pin down where it started. Was it The Binding of Isaac in 2011? Rogue Legacy and its popularization of the friendlier ‘roguelite’ minigenre? Slowly but surely, roguelikes have been gaining in popularity and prestige. It culminated with 2020’s indie smash success, Hades. And while it’s too early for anyone to truly bite off Supergiant’s masterpiece, 2021 has already seen one game that bears at least some aesthetic similarities: Curse of the Dead Gods.
“I have been promised by T’amok the Jaguar God so many things if I follow his path.”
That said, let me be upfront: While the two games share a genre and a broad style of gameplay, that’s where the similarities end. Indeed, Hades and Curse of the Dead Gods are almost diametrically opposed. Curse features no characters, no dialogue. I’d compare it more to Dead Cells, another game where your character is silent and anonymous, but at least Dead Cells had some worldbuilding in its levels. This is more like Risk of Rain, an avatar of pure gameplay.
The story, what little there is, is simple. You are an explorer? Archaeologist? Something. You are something. And you have come to an ancient temple dedicated to three gods, the Jaguar, the Eagle, and the Serpent. Explore the temple, bearing their curses and blessings alike, to earn the riches and power hidden within. And, in the end, you must defeat the avatars of the gods to earn your escape, as the temple has bound your soul to its shifting, bottomless grounds.
I confess, the game’s setting feels sketchy. It’s a small feeling, of course, because there isn’t much setting. But I do want to bring up the discomfort of having your lead be a White man pillaging an indigenous temple. There are no representations of native life here, just twisted monsters. Curse of the Dead Gods is playing with Aztec-influenced mythology, but they just want the aesthetics. The pulp influences are clear, but it’s hard to tell this story in 2020 without any acknowledgment of colonialism. It’s tempting, in games, to take an exploitative premise, strip it of some real-world connections, and then act as though that’s enough. Is it, though? This question is bigger than a game without characters can handle, but it ran through my head as I played.
“Each sacrifice is a trade for greater invulnerability.”
Right away, you can see how comparisons to Hades ring a bit shallow. Part of the charm of Hades was in the cast, the characters. The game didn’t just have an aesthetic; it had a worldview. It had themes. Most importantly, it had a protagonist who wanted something. Curse of the Dead Gods has none of that. Honestly, this is a game crying out for a character builder. If the lead is to be nothing, no one, then why not let me build someone more visually interesting than this?
There’s nothing wrong with not having a character or plot, necessarily. Slay the Spire is among my favorite games. I’ve probably played 200 hours of Spire, which also doesn’t really have any dialogue or narrative hook. Instead, games like this thrive on pure gameplay. They thrive on forcing you to make difficult choices about what to take, where to go, and how to build up your arsenal when you start from scratch.
Thankfully, Curse of the Dead Gods mostly excels here. The weapons feel distinct. None of them are useless (looking at you, Dead Cells’ shield), and thus far, I’ve enjoyed playing them all. Combos feel good, letting you experiment with different groups of weapons freely. The game lets you chain light attacks together to build towards a finisher, or swap to a secondary weapon for a special attack. But finishers, as well as slower, more powerful two-handed weapons, use stamina, the precious resource that allows you to dodge. Managing stamina in combat is a core aspect of mastering the combat. As with Dark Souls, tying attacking and dodging to the same stat forces you to be patient and thoughtful about how you fight.
“Each divine power a promise of victory against death’s minions.”
The game falters just a little when it comes to the exploration. Its ‘rooms’ are all small, cramped. They run together quickly. There are times I will round a corner and be locked out from retreating. Did I miss a treasure? Or is any random path as good as any other? That said, eagle eyed viewers will note rooms behind walls, often filled with traps and extra loot. The traps are fun, forcing you to pay attention to the environment. Quick-fingered players will be on their toes to dodge them. Clever players, on the other hand, may trigger them purposely, hoping to catch an enemy in the crossfire.
One of the game’s more interesting mechanics is the way it plays with light and darkness. You have a torch in one hand. That provides light, which lets you see traps — and enemies, since you take less damage in the light. But you have to put the torch away to wield a weapon. You can light braziers in various rooms, but doing so may mean swapping off your weapon mid-fight, and you can also accidentally destroy the braziers by fighting too close to them. It’s a minor but semi-engaging layer to the game’s combat. Unfortunately, it also contributes to the murkiness of the level design.
The game’s mapping is reasonably smart too. Rather than a single path through, you can choose one of three: Serpent, Eagle, or Jaguar. Each has different enemies, traps, curses, and bosses. In practice, this doesn’t feel as different as you’d hope, but it does give you some different experiences as you play. The first time you play each temple, ‘beating’ it involves just making it through the first boss. It doesn’t matter if you beat that boss with 1 HP or you don’t take a hit, once you beat him, you get showered with permanent upgrade materials.
Each temple has three ‘tiers’ like that. I found that this gave me a concrete sense of progression and achievement. Being able to ‘beat’ the temples in a more staggered way like this gave me good benchmarks to work towards, something more roguelikes need to consider. Because the genre depends on playing and replaying the same ever-changing areas, the games can feel fruitless and repetitive. Giving players achievable, understandable goals to push toward mitigates that problem somewhat, at least for me.
“Is that what you promised this bloodthirsty champion, T’amok?”
At the end of each room you explore is a reward and a door. The reward can be paid for in gold or blood. Paying in blood, opening doors, and taking damage from certain attacks all give you ‘corruption’. Fill that meter up, and you will get ‘cursed’, which changes the way the game is played in some way. Some curses are small; you can no longer gain gold from urns, but you can regain health. Other curses are possibly run-ending, such as one in which taking damage hides your stamina and health meter from you for a limited time. The most satisfying and innovative aspect of the game is managing that corruption meter, which sometimes forces you to sacrifice a new weapon or bypass a hard-fought reward to keep the meter at a manageable level — or to accept a curse to get it.
The first few curses are more of a mixed bag. For instance, I got a curse today that made it so that killing an enemy had a random chance to trigger an earthquake. If I got caught by falling rubble, I’d take 50-100 damage, a big chunk of health. However, enemies could also get caught in it — and they can’t dodge. It added complexity to my run, but it also upped the amount of damage I was capable of doing. Most of the curses are like that: Small punishment, but a careful player can turn it to their advantage.
If you get five curses at once, however, the fifth is meant to be a potential run-ender. There are no upsides here. Your health will drop until you have 1 HP, and it won’t go up again. It isn’t an immediate drop, but it is a merciless one. The only cure it to beat a boss (without taking a hit). It’s a solid device to amplify tension, though careful players will rarely reach that fifth curse in my experience.
“This shell of a man who tracks me in the shadows?”
The thing that keeps me coming back to Curse of the Dead Gods is its ‘Events’ section. Every day, they release a new event. These events meaningfully change the game and provide specific and engaging challenges. They give you modified, permanent curse-like conditions, but reward you with a big uptick in Crystal Skulls you can use to unlock new permanent upgrades.
So, for instance, today I played one in which the game was black-and-white — the ‘hallucination’ curse, which hides your health from you. However, this hid everything from me. I couldn’t see my health, nor could I see how much gold or corruption I had. Furthermore, I had no control over the path that I took on the map. This meant that the game forced tougher choices I might have avoided normally. I rarely pay for relics or weapons in blood, spending the early floors building a reserve of wealth that will allow me to spend liberally later on. This time, I might fight my way through a tough room, only to find that I couldn’t afford the prize at the end. And because I couldn’t see my corruption meter, paying with blood was fraught to begin with. Was this new bow good enough to risk a curse?
The main game is already wearing thin for me, but I do come back for the events. While many of these events are not particularly deep, they do force me to approach problems in a different way. In addition to solid benchmarking, this is another aspect future roguelikes should learn from. There are some diehards who will throw themselves at a problem over and over just because it’s there. For the rest of us, design elements can help push us to appreciate the game that way.
“He was defeated by a god versed in pragmatism.”
Curse of the Dead Gods is a mixed bag. The gameplay is tight and fluid. Upgrades come quickly, and mostly feel meaningful. Despite the popularity of the genre, there is still a lot of room for innovation, and Curse managed to do just that. This is definitely among the more approachable of the traditional roguelikes, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, the game is hampered, for me, by its lack of character, of story. I know classic roguelikes don’t often have those. I get that. But I like those. The thing that brought me back to fighting the same boss in Hades for the hundredth time was the realization that I had a relationship with that boss. If I won, that relationship might change; if I lost, it might not. Human beings are storytelling creatures, and Curse of the Dead Gods is more about the stories you find through gameplay than any sort of traditional narrative. It’s more like a sport.
At its core, this is a game for hardcore fans of the genre. It’s not as welcoming as Hades, not as exploratory as Dead Cells, not as deep as Binding of Isaac. It won’t make converts. But if you are in the mood for a Diablo-esque hack-and-slash action-RPG roguelike, you could do a lot worse.