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.