This review contains spoilers
Curse: The Eye of Isis is a "survival horror" game by Asylum Entertainment developed for Windows PC and Xbox Original as well as for Playstation 2 in Europe only; here's what I can tell you about this game: I put quotations around survival horror for a reason. It's a game that wears the skin of an old survival horror game, it has the fixed camera angles and the inventory management, puzzles, all the nine yards. But let me introduce a concept, have you ever heard of Asylum Films? Their movies consist of low budget knock offs with poor special effects, hammy acting, and strange design choices that reek of low effort cash grab and are definitely not scary. This may have had some effort but I can't think of anything more fitting considering Asylum Entertainment (probably not related) made this game. I'll start with the plot here:
The plot involves a thief breaking into a museum in London during the 1890s to steal the titular Eye of Isis statue, the dumb f u c k breaks it or something and a curse is released. Things go haywire and young Darien Dane goes to the museum to meet up with old childhood friend Victoria Sutton. I can't remember too much in terms of plot stuff, but you meet up with a guy named Abdul (the only actual source of real scares in this game) who can hold items and you both go search for Victoria. Hijinks happen I guess, there's stuff with the actual thief (named Le Chat here), mummy monsters, goons with guns roaming around, Darien gets cursed at one point and Victoria has to cure him three times. There's notes about the curse and how originally the Sutton and Dane families found the Statue in Egypt and then took it I guess? Eventually they chase after the thief who boards a boat led by some Humpty Dumpty lookin f u c ker named Bupo. You go through a ship to do....something? Whatever the case, you finally pop back to the actual Pyramid in Egypt to find both the thief, Bupo and MORE magical monsters who want to breathe on you harder than Matt Gaetz at a day care center. You finally go through all of that to stop this curse and you learn some stuff like Le Chat is actually Victoria's twin sister? Where this came from I don't know, and also Bupo turns into something akin to The Master from Fallout and after putting the statue back the curse finally comes to an end.
So what did I think of this plot? It's confusing, forgettable, most of the characters don't have much in the way of personality, and I truly struggled understanding what's going on most of the time and even while reading notes it's just kind of boring. Like where did the twin sister thing come from? That plot thread felt forced and hammy. Who is Bupo other than some random collector guy? Actually I'm gonna combine the plot section with sound design, art design, and everything else because I don't have too much to say here other than this game feels like it was supposed to be more of an Indiana Jones film than anything else, just dressed up with a "horror coating", the VA is ok, the locations (The Museum/Sewers, The Ship, the Pyramid) are boring and one note for the most part, again there's not much in the way of personality for anybody really (like I don't remember Darien saying much other than "Great Scott" til the end of the game) and keep in mind I'm not gonna really remember the plot as much as I will the gameplay: or better yet my janky experience thereof.
The gameplay was...mixed for me to say the least. The first I'll go into was glitches, I couldn't even get this game to load updates properly because it would sit in the install update thing for hours which I didn't find a fix for so that it probably contributed to glitches in my actual play through. For starters, I literally couldn't play the game past the first save area because it kept crashing until a friend sent me her save file (shoutout to Jinx btw thank you), when I pause the game it'll randomly just boot me out at strange times, legs would randomly spin around in a helicopter motion on the pause menu and continue until later in the game (more funny than anything else), one enemy who was chasing me decided to run back in the opposite direction into a wall or something and kept running in motions; in the Egypt levels Victoria won't go through the spinning doors properly, I could've been softlocked because Abdul wouldn't pop through the revolving door so I couldn't get a flamethrower to light up some candles but luckily I did, the Scorpion boss made me crash three times towards the end. It's
hilarious how many I encountered playing this game, and I'll post some later here at the end.
The actual gameplay you'll do some survival horrorey stuff like solve puzzles, conserve ammo and health, etc. It's not awful the way they do it, of course I broke out a guide (this is a good one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=942210108) to figure out what I was doing so I can't say much cause I suck. What I can say is that enemies consist of undead mummies or corpses for the most part, which is fine but they also have one special ability: the ability to breathe on you and give you the curse which will slowly lower your health over time unless you use amulets you pick off of dead bodies (which heals you and gets rid of curses but I don't think that was explained well) or menthol jars. I don't mind combat being mixed up but in certain cases I would get cursed because the cameras were orientated in a strange manner, which when moving between cameras have this thing where instead of continuing to move in a consistent manner in that direction makes you move in the other way so then you have to kind of spin and reorient yourself and it just feels weird. Speaking of controls? The PC controls f u c king blow and the controller support is worse so I had to buy this app- https://store.steampowered.com/app/367670/Controller_Companion/ (great by the way) and used this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=648605819) to put in good controller support stuff so I could actually play the game in a comfortable manner. When fixed camera angles are done well it can be atmospheric and great but in this it's more of a detriment to fight against, the gun combat (though maybe a glitch) I had trouble locking onto enemies sometimes and would aim next to them even if there's no other enemies in the room. I guess if I had to add another thing is that with the limited inventory space you have to go to Abdul in order to switch out items as well as save your progress, and let me tell you this guy is dedicated to his job. He literally provides 100 percent of the scares coming out of strange places and hiding spots, yelling your name and plot exposition while some goofy genie music plays in the background. It can get kind of tedious but overall it was tolerable for the most part.
I don't hate this game, but truthfully it's obtuse, confusing to fix up and patch and generally kind of dull. Also my playtime didn't count (I had 5 hours) so I had to leave the start up menu on so I could write this up. It came out in 2004, I know some things were a product of it's time and if you're willing to put in the time and effort to fix the damn thing in certain spots for 2.99 it's not the worst price but there are better and more interesting games you could be playing. Here's some guides I found (not the ones above) and videos I recorded.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1683612384
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Curse:The_Eye_of_Isis#Unable_to_Execute_error.28Steam_Version.29
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kRd3GtFtokNNtmjlb-W5uonsghVGpLvf/view?usp=sharing (If you keep crashing after trying to save with Abdul the first time)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB3ImoxUBsM&ab_channel=gamemast15r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn6gqZ4phQE&ab_channel=gamemast15r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz1gIE1CUlo&ab_channel=gamemast15r
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
The plot involves a thief breaking into a museum in London during the 1890s to steal the titular Eye of Isis statue, the dumb f u c k breaks it or something and a curse is released. Things go haywire and young Darien Dane goes to the museum to meet up with old childhood friend Victoria Sutton. I can't remember too much in terms of plot stuff, but you meet up with a guy named Abdul (the only actual source of real scares in this game) who can hold items and you both go search for Victoria. Hijinks happen I guess, there's stuff with the actual thief (named Le Chat here), mummy monsters, goons with guns roaming around, Darien gets cursed at one point and Victoria has to cure him three times. There's notes about the curse and how originally the Sutton and Dane families found the Statue in Egypt and then took it I guess? Eventually they chase after the thief who boards a boat led by some Humpty Dumpty lookin f u c ker named Bupo. You go through a ship to do....something? Whatever the case, you finally pop back to the actual Pyramid in Egypt to find both the thief, Bupo and MORE magical monsters who want to breathe on you harder than Matt Gaetz at a day care center. You finally go through all of that to stop this curse and you learn some stuff like Le Chat is actually Victoria's twin sister? Where this came from I don't know, and also Bupo turns into something akin to The Master from Fallout and after putting the statue back the curse finally comes to an end.
So what did I think of this plot? It's confusing, forgettable, most of the characters don't have much in the way of personality, and I truly struggled understanding what's going on most of the time and even while reading notes it's just kind of boring. Like where did the twin sister thing come from? That plot thread felt forced and hammy. Who is Bupo other than some random collector guy? Actually I'm gonna combine the plot section with sound design, art design, and everything else because I don't have too much to say here other than this game feels like it was supposed to be more of an Indiana Jones film than anything else, just dressed up with a "horror coating", the VA is ok, the locations (The Museum/Sewers, The Ship, the Pyramid) are boring and one note for the most part, again there's not much in the way of personality for anybody really (like I don't remember Darien saying much other than "Great Scott" til the end of the game) and keep in mind I'm not gonna really remember the plot as much as I will the gameplay: or better yet my janky experience thereof.
The gameplay was...mixed for me to say the least. The first I'll go into was glitches, I couldn't even get this game to load updates properly because it would sit in the install update thing for hours which I didn't find a fix for so that it probably contributed to glitches in my actual play through. For starters, I literally couldn't play the game past the first save area because it kept crashing until a friend sent me her save file (shoutout to Jinx btw thank you), when I pause the game it'll randomly just boot me out at strange times, legs would randomly spin around in a helicopter motion on the pause menu and continue until later in the game (more funny than anything else), one enemy who was chasing me decided to run back in the opposite direction into a wall or something and kept running in motions; in the Egypt levels Victoria won't go through the spinning doors properly, I could've been softlocked because Abdul wouldn't pop through the revolving door so I couldn't get a flamethrower to light up some candles but luckily I did, the Scorpion boss made me crash three times towards the end. It's
hilarious how many I encountered playing this game, and I'll post some later here at the end.
The actual gameplay you'll do some survival horrorey stuff like solve puzzles, conserve ammo and health, etc. It's not awful the way they do it, of course I broke out a guide (this is a good one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=942210108) to figure out what I was doing so I can't say much cause I suck. What I can say is that enemies consist of undead mummies or corpses for the most part, which is fine but they also have one special ability: the ability to breathe on you and give you the curse which will slowly lower your health over time unless you use amulets you pick off of dead bodies (which heals you and gets rid of curses but I don't think that was explained well) or menthol jars. I don't mind combat being mixed up but in certain cases I would get cursed because the cameras were orientated in a strange manner, which when moving between cameras have this thing where instead of continuing to move in a consistent manner in that direction makes you move in the other way so then you have to kind of spin and reorient yourself and it just feels weird. Speaking of controls? The PC controls f u c king blow and the controller support is worse so I had to buy this app- https://store.steampowered.com/app/367670/Controller_Companion/ (great by the way) and used this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=648605819) to put in good controller support stuff so I could actually play the game in a comfortable manner. When fixed camera angles are done well it can be atmospheric and great but in this it's more of a detriment to fight against, the gun combat (though maybe a glitch) I had trouble locking onto enemies sometimes and would aim next to them even if there's no other enemies in the room. I guess if I had to add another thing is that with the limited inventory space you have to go to Abdul in order to switch out items as well as save your progress, and let me tell you this guy is dedicated to his job. He literally provides 100 percent of the scares coming out of strange places and hiding spots, yelling your name and plot exposition while some goofy genie music plays in the background. It can get kind of tedious but overall it was tolerable for the most part.
I don't hate this game, but truthfully it's obtuse, confusing to fix up and patch and generally kind of dull. Also my playtime didn't count (I had 5 hours) so I had to leave the start up menu on so I could write this up. It came out in 2004, I know some things were a product of it's time and if you're willing to put in the time and effort to fix the damn thing in certain spots for 2.99 it's not the worst price but there are better and more interesting games you could be playing. Here's some guides I found (not the ones above) and videos I recorded.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1683612384
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Curse:The_Eye_of_Isis#Unable_to_Execute_error.28Steam_Version.29
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kRd3GtFtokNNtmjlb-W5uonsghVGpLvf/view?usp=sharing (If you keep crashing after trying to save with Abdul the first time)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB3ImoxUBsM&ab_channel=gamemast15r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn6gqZ4phQE&ab_channel=gamemast15r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz1gIE1CUlo&ab_channel=gamemast15r
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/