Indie | Curse – Episode I: Hell Awaits

There’s a term in game modification that you may or may not be aware of.  “Total conversion.”  It means, effectively, a mod developed from the bare-bones structure of an existing game, but with no apparent links to the original product.  Usually, the definition’s stretched a bit, and it’s taken to mean a few new textures, a couple of new weapons, and a story that takes place in a different universe.

Curse is the most totally-converted Half-Life 2 mod I’ve seen yet.  Not a single asset from the original game finds a home in Curse.  Everything – from the menu, to the environments, to the very crux of the game’s mechanics – has been entirely built from scratch.  The result is an aesthetic that’s genuinely unique.  It’s also one that’s staggeringly beautiful.

This is Source at its absolute, shiniest best.  The rendering engine’s code, I would imagine, remains predominantly unchanged from the Half-Life 2 days.  What has changed is the texture resolution, with every object skinned with twice the sharpness of other games using the same engine.  The team behind Curse has also absolutely mastered lighting techniques, with gorgeous bloom effects giving way to subtle hues, and powerful rays casting dramatic shadows across huge vistas.

//Curiouser and curiouser
It has problems.  It’s not something everyone’s going to like.  The indie scene is often championed as a place for developers to take risks and push things forward, to test out new gameplay types, or even to do away with traditional gameplay altogether.  Curse does the opposite, clearly leaning towards the conventions of yesteryear – happily updating them, but understanding its own desire to stick largely to formula.  Most of its forward thinking aspects – its combat controls; its occasional, physics-based environment puzzles – have already been established for at least a short while.

It’s often rather aimless, too. I was surprised to find it didn’t bother me that much, but others will.  Curse’s old-school nature means dropping you into the mix with little effort to contextualise the situation.  There’s never an explanation for the magical powers you possess, the rising of the dead at every turn, or even your being there in the first place.  As the episode reaches its conclusion, the scene seems to be set for something a little more narrative-driven in the future, but for now it’s all rather abstract and unconnected.

Perhaps most curious of all is Curse’s underlying design structure.  The ultimate aim in each of Curse’s three levels is to rid the area of evil – but you don’t have to.  Often, you can make a dash from one end of the map to the other, avoiding the most serious challenges and emerging unscathed, despite the baddies that remain.

Instead of the traditional method of simply hiding away the best goodies in secret areas, but ultimately maintaining a linear path through the bulk of the level, Curse hides away vast chunks of gameplay in gargantuan secret sections.  Triggering a series of craftily disguised buttons unlocks a new section in which you activate Nightmare Mode, an impressively hellish and otherworldly version of the level, with red light flooding themaze-like passages, and huge pits full of worms appearing in the ground.

But unless guided by the curiosity of being told “a gate has opened in the green chamber” when you can see the level exit directly in front of you, you’d never know.  Indeed, on my first play-through – which took just under an hour, incidentally – I completely bypassed the vast majority of the secret stuff, missing out on a decent chunk of the game, and perhaps some of its most exciting sequences.  While allowing the player to progress in the way he or she desires is, in a sense, a reasonable plan, Curse is occasionally a little too opaque for its own good.

But once you figure it out, the search for every last room of Curse’s authentic, cavernous passages becomes riveting.  It is, in almost every way, a professional-quality release, with only the mostminuscule of balancing issues (and, of course, its length) to overtly separate it from the commercial crowd.  Play it to absolute completion and it’ll entertain you for a good afternoon, and the cliffhanger conclusion’s strong enough to make waiting for the next episode seem like an impossible task.  Let’s hope part two builds on the quality of this opening.  If it does, it could be a very special series indeed.

You can grab Curse – Episode I from its website. You’ll need Half-Life 2 installed to play it.

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