Came for the gameplay, stayed for the world and characters.

Ever get that feeling that a game never truly ends? That, whenever you think you're almost done, the game surprises you with hidden areas and quests? Curse Crackers is that kind of game. I would most closely compare it to Super Mario World, which blew my mind as a kid with all its secrets scattered through the world map. Curse Crackers takes it one step beyond with its lovable cast of characters and storylines.

I really grew to love most if not all characters, and I became genuinely invested in the lore and mysteries laid throughout. There's still some loose threads at the ends, so hopefuly Colorgrave will make a sequel some day.

Very underappreciated platformer with a genuinely all-timer movement system and solid levels. The world map is surprisingly in-depth with side quests, towns & hidden areas. In general, the game has tons of content and will last you for longer than you would expect for this type of game. The sprites look great, and the chosen colour palette is very unique, favouring lots of pink & yellow tones.

Unfortunately, it gets worse as it goes along, with less open-ended levels and fewer of the fun NPC interactions, but still worth seeing through to the end. The game is also unnecessarily obtuse with some of its secrets, particularly in the postgame. Walkthroughs are currently scant, so it was a pain finding some of these.

For me, this was a palate cleanser game, so to really try and consider it as an entity apart from my personal decision to play it as something which isn’t a proper exegesis of its own identity, instead, using it as a functioning way to return to my own personal levelling point, would be dishonest and kind of insincere criticism. So rather than trying to suss out successes and failures, contrasting them inherently with what they saddle up beside in the mix abreast each other, I’ll just write down a few of the things that I liked about Curse Crackers, from my experience and what I’ve got going on, as well as from what is just text within.

- Normally, I hate the “uWu”, anime, naive girl squad as roster for a video game; I think it’s profoundly embarrassing in Nier, grossly exploitative in any the various Gacha games that spend their unscrupulously earned profits on solely advertising and Viagra, and a consistently mild irritation in games like Momodora, Signalis, and Unsighted. Curse Crackers kind of got through my distaste for this character design though, and in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from the promotional material surrounding the game. The banner splash on the store page is exactly the kind of grossly immature and perverse fetishization and objectification expected from a lot of games which opt to use modern anime styling: breasts half hung out, swooping hair used as tentative covering, enormous eyes set into faces untouched by any age or experience; this store page is, however, basically the only place this caricatured imagery will appear. In the game proper, due to the pixelation of the Gameboy borrowed rendering, everything about the characters, both their sprites in play as well as their portraits, are so nebulous in their approximation of human forms that they can’t rely on titillation to be appreciated. So, in place of that overdone farce, the animation is mostly used, with the weird proportions of anime as groundwork, to effect a very silent film era comedy. Instead of telling jokes that cause the character portraits to sweat, drool, and blush (as done in the “jokes'' of some of the ignoble cousins to this aesthetic), the humour in this game comes from the procedural setting up of a situation, with the clarity of the level art also being a high spot for the game, interacting with the character stretching into tableaus from Hellzapoppin, or from goofishly oafing around mundane spaces like The Tramp, or deadpanning to the camera like Buster Keaton. Even the character costumes that one can unlock through play are much more Abbott and Costello than Honey Pop - silly play dress up as one winks at the audience instead of fulfilling a vastness of sexual reduction (it helps that Belle actually wears costumes and not, like, a tie and a hat signifying ‘business’ over pasties).

- Maybe I’m in kind of a low play sort of place, but the fact that this game can be breezed through without worrying about jump precision or frame perfect double jumps or wall clings on pixel exact collisions is so refreshing. I love a maso-core platformer - like, gimme 1001 spikes while recovering from surgery: I’ll feel loved - but I really didn’t need this month a game goading me into deleting it. I know that some people will play this when they are looking to drench themselves in sweat and build up their thumb calluses (and I might have felt the opposite to how I do now were I looking for that kind of game as well), but it felt so good to just talk on the phone with my mom and mindlessly ace these levels.

- Similar to the last point, but I love hit-the-boss-3-times fights right now. A good health bar battle of attrition smackdown has a title for accomplishment that is more difficult to deliver with a simpler design, such as that in Curse Crackers, for achieving victory that pervades this easier route, but I think that when catering to this feeling of overcoming has gone from a design goal that can be nuanced to a routine part of 2020s game design skinner boxing: it’s a part of the loop to feed engagement, not necessarily the peak of coalescing goals which have been weaved throughout other various components of the game. The 3 hit model is more deployed as a little topper - almost superfluous to the actual experience of play. Curse Crackers uses its bosses almost more as showing off the clarity that can be achieved by increasing the allowable maximum size of their model scales, again reinforcing comedy in the possibility afforded by how things are rendered. Something about stomping on a skeleton who has a mohawk growing from the bone of their skull three times (interspersed with an extremely stripped back Guitar Hero) keeps the pace flowing, keeps the joke from growing stale, keeps the mood light, and allows for a little art flex on the dev’s side.

A ton of this game is forgettable: the dialogue is extremely skimmable, the sense of place is pretty nil, the puzzling is non-existent, and any mechanic or system outside of the platform and throwing is tagged on without purpose. But it was so exactly what I needed, I can’t help but be happy with the time I spent in this fun little circus.

A lost platformer from the original Gameboy with a focus on collectables and secrets. Initially I found this to be great, playing somewhere between Donkey Kong Country and Wario Land - however as time went on I found myself souring to both the weirdly incoherent world design and the core platforming. A large part of this was due to the literal framing of the action - the game feels far too zoomed-in for the type of game this is - meaning complex jumps are harder than they need to be and collectables are obscured just because you can't see that at the bottom of a hole there is a ledge.

I finished the main set of levels, and a large chunk of the secret content, but the bulk of this game is hidden behind layers that the majority of players, myself included, wont ever experience. This is a bit of a shame, as I suspect the more interesting levels are obscured in this way, but ultimately the core gameplay was not strong enough for me to put in the required effort to find out.

This one was really frustrating to play. I ended up really enjoying and appreciating what Colorgrave achieved with their previous title, Prodigal, and I'm not a 2D zelda guy! But I am a 2d platformer guy and I wouldn't have thought Colourgrave never made one before with how smooth and technical the moveset of Belle and Chime is. And they better married the aesthetic to the more meandering slice of life elements. Prodigal looked fine if somewhat generic but Curse Crackers commits to pastel blues, whites and pinks that make it snug and pleasant to play. There's so much to appreciate but unfortunately Curse Crackers embraces the my pet peeve as far as 2D platformers go: collectibles. Instead of designing stages that would make the nuanced verbset of Belle and Chime sing, they are instead stuffed with 'secrets' that never amount to anything more than hugging and hitting every wall for an invisible entrance. Although the last couple of worlds do offer some thrilling gauntlets, the levels in this game never amount to more than indistinct and shapeless stop and start affairs. And they're all stitched together by a large yet mostly barren SMW-styleworld map that only ever served to disperse the little community whose interactions I got the most enjoyment out of in contrast to Prodigal's compact little burg tying its inhabitants together. The fact that a lot of the cozy slice of life and post game content is tied behind completion nearly poisoned the well for me. I was relaxed and content while playing Prodigal but I was never able to get into a similar sweet spot with Curse Crackers. The ingredients were there but what they cooked was not to my taste. This one was disappointing.

I started off really liking this game. I was drawn in by the art style at first. This is one of those games where, for the most part, simply moving around is fun. Playing as an acrobat character adds some interesting movement tools to your kit that let you move around levels really fast. Sadly for me, I only found about half of the levels in the game to be fun to run through. The first two worlds I played through were really fun and well designed but as I progressed further into the game, the quality of the levels drastically decreased. Levels in the swamp and the library specifically were either boring or difficult for the wrong reasons. Levels can feel very cramped at times, limited your otherwise very fun movement. There is just too much on screen at once sometimes. The levels have a lot of replay value to them, but once I got about halfway through the story, replaying levels was the last thing I wanted to do. The world and characters are fun enough, and there are side quests that offer a nice distraction. I found it difficult to keep track of all of the stuff to do in the quests though, sometimes and ended up accidentally progressing them when talking to random characters on a whim. I did eventually find an option tucked away in the last page of the menu that shows you what areas to go to for quests, but that should have been on by default in my opinion. There seems to be a lot more for me to do after completing the main story, but honestly, I don't really want to. The story itself had a satisfying conclusion, and I'm not really dying to jump into more frustratingly designed levels. I'm really torn on this game, which is why I'm even writing this much in the first place. It probably seems like my criticisms outweigh the positive points I made about this game, but I really did have a lot of fun in the first half. The last world of the game's story was also a great one, and its aesthetic and story implications really surprised me too.