By Dale Farris, Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
September 2004

Game Overview

Become Dr. Darien Dane, or his assistant Victoria Sutton, as you investigate the mysterious disappearance of an ancient sacred Egyptian statue from the British Museum. This unique statue is protected by an evil curse that resides within it, that causes madness, or violent death to all those who come in contact with it.

The Curse manifests itself by raising the dead and animating diabolical objects. It is up to you to find and return the cursed statue to the pyramid that it should never have been taken from. Are you up for the challenge and the race against time?

Curse is the new action adventure game from DreamCatcher Games, and it is also available for the Xbox. If your PC configuration might not support the game's minimum requirements, you will find it plays fine on the Xbox console.

Summary of Features

A breathtaking game that combines suspense, terror and action!

Immerse yourself in 7 distinct worlds - each more terrifying than the last

Everything is against you, as even the most insignificant of objects will come alive and try to kill you!

Third person game play, and action phases in first person view point

Fight the evil Curse with an arsenal of weapons:  shotgun, rifle, pistol, truncheon, crossbow, flame-thrower, and mortar gun.

Play as both Dr. Darien Dane and Victoria Sutton, each with their own missions to complete

Immersive, fully detailed environments

You move the character through this 3D, third person game with the arrow keys, while controlling the direction with the mouse

Supports mouse and keyboard, as well as joystick and keyboard

Super eerie sound effects

Various footstep sounds and ambient background mood music and noises help involve you in the game

Sudden, surprise combat with numerous bad guys

Various big boss fight levels

Thrilling gameplay that is heightened with detailed lighting effects

Game Play

You play Curse mostly in 3rd person view, as you move the characters through the fully realized, 3D environments. The game's camera takes control over what you see on the screen, and it automatically changes as you move from room to room, down hallways, around corners, and into large environments when the camera pulls far back to provide you with the larger view.

The characters move with the arrow keys, up for forward, down for backward, and left and right for left-right movement. When you press the up arrow, the mouse controls the direction of the character as you keep the up arrow key pressed, and the mouse will let you move the character all around a room while pressing an arrow key.

The 3rd person view camera moves in close and pulls away for a removed perspective, and as you move the character the camera automatically changes the perspective as you move. This means many times as you move the character from one room to another, or around corners, you will find the character immediately confronted with combat with the many, many bad guys in the game. This adds suspense to the game and makes it more difficult as well.

The game lets you choose from normal to difficult game play, and the normal setting is very difficult. So, choose the difficult setting only if you are cracker-jack quick with the mouse and keyboard.

You use the mouse buttons to control the use of your weapons. You press the right button to wield the weapon, and the left button to activate the button. The weapons include a truncheon, pistol, shotgun, flamethrower, crossbow, and mortar gun. Of course, as in any of today's action games, you only get the more powerful weapons later in the game.

Also, you will come across all sorts of objects as you kill the bad guys or find already dead corpses. In this game, as you move the character you will need to closely watch the movement of the character's head. When you come near something that can be described or might contain something, the character's head will turn toward the object. For example, when you come across corpses on the floor, the character's head will turn down, and if you click the left mouse button, the game will tell you what you have found.

You can find smelling salts or healing oil to use to heal your character, as well as tons of shotgun shells, mortar shells, or pistol bullets. In addition, numerous bad guys will give up important objects that you must find and pick up in order to progress in the game. This is why Curse can be referred to as an action adventure. You must roam all around the various settings in the game, and find keys or other objects that must be used to open other doors that lead to further game play. However, if you miss an object, the game does not give you much helpful information indicating what is missing. This represents the adventure game aspect of Curse, and as you engage in the constant combat with the numerous types of bad guys, this represents the action element.

The puzzles are mostly about finding the correct objects, or keys, that are required in order to open all the doors and get through the game. The puzzles to solve are not as devious as what we find in today's adventure games, and are nicely blended in with the style and atmosphere of the game. You just have to be sure you click on all dead guys and objects the character's head nods toward, in order to not miss any of these key objects.

The graphics in this game are nicely detailed, and environments have been well designed. The game's lighting effects also change to reflect the different environments, and the game's sound effects add to the suspense of the game. You will actually hear different sound effects for foot steps, depending on the type of material your character is walking on. For example, when you walk on sand, the foot steps sound just like you were really walking on sand.

The plot line is unique and the game play is certainly different. You will find your characters moving through various detailed settings, including a huge museum with many stories and rooms, complex sewers, a large ship with many rooms and levels, and a labyrinthine pyramid.

The story also is not going to jump out at you, as you play the game. Slowly, as you play through the game, the game's complex plot and story line is revealed, providing a richly detailed plot that adds further value to the game.

The sound effects and voice-over narration are all well done, and the dialogue is done very well. Many of the game character interactions are nicely synchronized with the lip movements of the characters, a nice feature that indicates the attention devoted to the game by the developers.

Curse is an excellent action-adventure game, that provides the best of adventure game puzzle solving, environment mapping, and action combat, while very reasonably priced. Compared with the price point on most all other action games, Curse is a real bargain.

About The Walkthrough Solution Guides

I urge anyone interested in this neat game to also consider getting a copy of the solutions guide. In this game, the guide will really come in handy, because of the need to be sure to know where to go and how to find all the required objects in the game. The game guide will also help with forming a better understanding of the background to the story, which will help keep up with what is going on in the game. The guide will also help in learning which objects are required in order to solve the game's relatively less taxing puzzles.

In my situation, playing with a walkthrough means I can concentrate on moving the game plot along, and most importantly, open up all the wonderful scenes and action that the coders have worked so hard to include in the game. Without a walkthrough, I just feel I am not getting my money's worth out of the game. Also, I always appreciate having the help to get through the game so I can savor all the impressive screens and animated cut-scenes, as was the intent of the game creators.

What makes this issue even more relevant here is that DreamCatcher seems to realize this, as evidenced by their always wise price points for their games and their solution guides. You end up with a total investment that means you will be better assured you can get through the game and not end up spending an excessive amount of time with the game. So, no, I don't think using a walkthrough solution guide is any indication of any lack of skill or abilities, but instead, a more appropriate way to invest minimal time with an adventure game, that ends up much more likely to be a fun experience.

You can find an online walkthrough at www.justadventure.com

In addition, if the combat gets too taxing for you, you can find a nice trainer for Curse at www.gamewinners.com This trainer is first loaded, before you load the game, and it will let you turn on "god" mode and have unlimited ammo and other key objects.

Game Saves

You cannot save your game at any point. In order to save your game, you must find the character named Abdul and click when you get near him. Then, you can save your game. This character Abdul also plays a part in the game's story line, and he follows your characters as you play through the game. Sometimes Abdul takes over the game and sets up some of the many super cinematics, and other times you have to go to him. When you find him, he stays where he first shows up, until you progress the game and Abdul moves forward with your characters.

Inventory Procedure

In addition, Abdul is important for swapping inventory items. In Curse, the inventory is not unlimited, and you have a maximum number of slots for objects. So, sometimes you will need to hand off to Abdul some of your items in order to make room for other objects that will come up later.

In addition, as you play through the game, you will change characters and play either as Darien or Victoria. At certain points in the game, when you play as one of these characters, you will likely need to swap items from one character's inventory to another, to make room for other objects that come up later.

The use of the walkthrough guide will help you better control which objects you need in your inventory and which objects you will need to hand off. At a couple of places in the game, I came across other later objects that I needed to pick up, but could not, so I had to figure how to back-track to find Abdul to give him some objects to free up space for these other objects.

Combat

Combat in Curse is fairly difficult, and you can select from normal to difficult when you start the game. The AI for the bad guys gets much harder in difficult mode, and the bad guys also have defensive maneuvers that can block your attack. This means you have to be very careful when in combat, as you can easily use up all your ammo firing at the enemies while these are in defensive mode, thus resulting in your easy death.

In Curse, you can easily die many, many times, so finding Abdul to save your game becomes very important since these save points are few and far between. The numerous combat situations will require you to likely start over a saved game many times, before you get the hang of how best to quickly kill the various bad guys.

Curse also has a nice variety of bad guys, ranging from human goons to all sorts of zombies and mummies, all of which have various ranges of difficulty. When you kill these bad guys, many times these characters release necessary objects you need in later points in the game, so it is imperative that you always engage all the bad guys, in order to not miss an important object. In many situations, even though you can quickly run your character past these bad guys, by holding down the Ctrl key while you hold down the arrow key, you will risk missing an important object that a dead bad guy will give up after you kill them.

The game also has some different boss fights that are also challenging. As with most all video console game boss fights, there is a certain strategy to most effectively killing these bosses that is more easily figured out if you use the strategy guide, or the online walkthrough. Even with these strategies solved for you, overcoming the game's bosses will still be difficult.

As you take damage to your character, you will want to frequently visit the inventory and use the stored smelling salts and healing oil that you find throughout the game. The game is good about placing a lot of these healing objects as you progress through the game, but you must remember to always check corpses and the killed bad guys to be sure you do not miss some of these important healing objects.

Targeted Customers

With Curse, DreamCatcher Games provides a nice addition to today's saturated horror survival genre of action games, with the nice added touch of the adventure game features of figuring out how to solve the game's puzzles or find the right objects to open up all the doors that are placed throughout the game story. Curse will appeal to action games fans, as well as adventure game fans, but it is important to remember that Curse is not just a typical point and click adventure game, but is filled with harrowing combat that adds more suspense to the game.

System Requirements

Pentium 600MAz or faster processor
Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP
128MB RAM
700MB free hard disk space
4x CD/DVD-ROM
Direct3D video card with true Hardware Transform and Lighting capability
DirectX 8.0a compatible sound card
Keyboard
Mouse
Joystick

Install and Setup

The game should install and set up with no problems, and the game will load about 700MB of data onto a machine. The game comes on 1 CD ROM disc, and the game disc does need to be placed in the CD ROM drive in order to play the game. The game will also you to enter an identification code (required for installation) that is included with the game, or the game will not load.

Uninstalling the game involves the use of the games uninstall feature in its folder on the Start, Programs menu.

I loaded the game on a Win XP Pro machine (P III-850, 256MB SDRAM) that had a Creative Labs Annihilator 2, 32MB video card (an nVidia GeForce 2 GTS board), and a Creative Labs Live X Gamer! sound board, and the latest drivers for each. An HP CD RW 9200 drive served as the CD ROM drive. The mouse and keyboard were both PS/2 connections. I also had already installed the DirectX 9 files. My machine also had an internal Zip 250 drive, standard floppy, one 8-port USB hub, a Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick, standard microphone, Cambridge Soundworks DTS 2000 speaker system, and a NIC board connected to SW Bell's DSL modem.

Note that this system is certainly not a high-end, state-of-the-art configured system. If you have a higher end machine, with a better video and sound card, more RAM, and a faster CPU, this game will definitely be even more impressive. On my system, although the game did play, I think gameplay will be far more impressive on higher end systems.

Note that when you open the game, you can also change the resolution of the screen, from very low to very high, but you will of course need to be sure your monitor can support higher resolution settings and you have a video card that can supply these higher resolutions. The higher resolutions of course mean the game will look even more impressive.

Price

$19.99 (Super Bargain)
$  9.99 the official strategy & solutions guide (a great bargain also)

About DreamCatcher

DreamCatcher launched its first title in 1996, with a small band of people who believed in providing customers with quality entertainment software at affordable prices. Since that time, DreamCatcher has become one of the most successful small-sized publisher in the entertainment software industry, and was the fastest growing publisher in 2000, growing over 800% according to PC Data. DreamCatcher Interactive was listed in Profitguide.com's article: Canada's Fastest Growing Companies 2002, and ranked #5.

In 1996, DreamCatcher Interactive launched their first title and since then, they have become a very successful publisher in the computer game entertainment software industry. In my opinion, one of this company's strongest assets is their dedication to provide customers with high quality entertainment software at very affordable prices. Some of the best interactive computer games now on the market come from DreamCatcher.

Bringing to market titles that are affordable, without jeopardizing content quality, is another significant factor that helps distinguish this company from the many that flood the market with countless game titles. DreamCatcher thrives on innovative marketing strategies, solid retail and developer partnerships, and on providing excellent customer support that is well above industry standards.

A new partnership with Her Interactive has enabled DreamCatcher to now sell the super games in the Nancy Drew series, including Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger, and Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion. Check this link to read a review of these Nancy Drew Interactive Mystery Adventure Games.

Dracula: The Resurrection and In Cold Blood are two current games for the PC that will soon be released for the Playstation, and DreamCatcher also plans to release more games in the future for the Playstation 2 and the GameBoy Color platforms.

Necronomicon ($19.99) and The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin ($19.99) are two of DreamCatcher's newer games that should also prove to be successful titles in their long list of super adventure games.

Other super games from DreamCatcher Interactive include Traitor's Gate, The Messenger, Riddle of the Sphinx, Jewels of the Oracle, Jewels II, Egypt 1156 B.C., Odyssey, TimeScape, Ancient Conquest, Beyond Time, Beyond Atlantis, Lightbringer, Legend of Lotus Spring, Nightlong, Seven Games of the Soul (also sold in Europe as Faust), SafeCracker, The Forgotten, The Sacred Amulet, and Time Machine.

All these are similarly designed adventure games, and all are priced very reasonably, the most expensive being $29.99 (In Cold Blood), with most around $14.99, and many even priced at $9.99, which I think are super prices for these super games. At the time of this writing, I have purchased and played nearly all these games, and these reasonable price points have always gotten my attention.

I think these affordable price points represent a very important strategy of DreamCatcher that has helped them achieve their success. When you consider the very expensive proposition to invest in the coding and other very expensive costs to develop and produce a computer game today, I think it is quite remarkable that this company markets their products at such a reasonable price.

I also think it is important to remember that DreamCatcher is still very much in the business of producing quality computer games, something many other companies can no longer attest to since they have gone out of business. What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is that at the time of this writing, DreamCatcher Interactive remains wholly owned and self-sufficient, and has not yet been absorbed by a larger company.

So, with the easy on the pocket-book price of the game, and the also minimal price of the solution guides, you have the makings of a winner in the hotly contested battle for our limited disposable income and free time to invest in playing computer games. DreamCatcher Interactive is certainly a company worth watching and supporting.

Contact Information

DreamCatcher
The Adventure Company
5000 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3H 5T5
info@dreamcatchergames.com

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.