Curse of Anabelle Reviews

• What I Liked Epic story Beautiful graphics & atmosphere Exploring the environments and finding hidden items, notes, or places Jumpscares are executed nicely and not overdone Save Checkpoints are well places throughout the game • What I Disliked Demons UI

I can say that Curse of Anabelle stands out by it's lore. It looks like a generic horror story but the lore behind is much deeper. Graphics: 8/10 Sounds: 4/10 (Because of the voice acting) Gameplay: 6/10 ( needs refinement on some aspects like QTE, guiding etc. ) Story: 8/10 If you like a deep lore and doing a lot of reading for finding out the back story in a game you should try this.

I really don’t post reviews, but I think this game needs one. I was very excited to play this game after watching the videos. It felt unique to me, and I liked the idea of having the lore of King Solomon and used in a different way. The environments and atmosphere were all well designed and looked amazing. The developers set up the game’s lore and premise amazingly in the beginning. You have a book of the demons King Solomon controlled and that gave you an idea of what you will be facing in the future. The art of each demon was unique and beautiful, and the idea of facing those menacing demons in the house was thrilling. Also being given King Solomon’s seal, it set up the idea that you get to control the demons you defeat or use their powers, listed in the book, to navigate through the house and fight lesser demons along the way. In the end, there were so many missed opportunities. The demons you faced in each room was just the same black cloaked figure (sometimes white or black with different shiny sigils) with the same scripted lines and not the amazing figures you saw in the book. Demon battles seriously played like Pokémon. Just like in Pokémon, both opponents are on a circle patch throwing fireballs back and forth in the exact same environment. The battles were so redundant. It’s the exact same strategy. Hold the required QTE letter and walk left and right to avoid the one hit kill fireballs. Once defeated, you don’t even get to control the demon or get to use the powers they have that was listed in the book to fight off the monster in the past timeline. Time travel and David’s light was interesting, until you realized that you can sometime teleport right on top of the monster you’re trying to run from or activated David’s light too soon (when the monster is not seen) and are forced to just run for a cleansed room. This game was advertised as an adventure-horror/puzzle game, but really its just a hidden object/walking simulator. You do get random jump scares, but its so subtle that it sometimes goes unnoticed since you are basically staring at your compass looking for the next component to create the door unlocking sigils. There are no puzzles, the only puzzle is trying to figure out if the doors are locked or not as you try to find objects in the house. Finally, it is bad game design if you make story content collectables. You have to search the house for diary pages to understand the story better. If you miss a page the story gets lost. It’s better to get a diary page as a reward for cleansing a room, given to the player at certain important points automatically, or highlighted on your compass like all the other items. It had a very high potential to be a great game, but fell short due to lack of TLC and innovations.

Curse of Anabelle is NOT a Walking Simulator. It's true, that you'll spend most of your time walking or more like running around frantically searching for stuff, through maze-like corridors, halls and rooms of a huge mansion. Though the game design is pretty old-school. That's what I like about it. It defines itself as a psychological horror/puzzle game which is not far off. But I think it's heavier on the puzzle side with a bit of an interactive storytelling going on. It is not entirely made of jump scares, in fact, you only get a few of those which leaves you with a randomly spawning dark entity following you with loud steps. You can't outrun it easily but you have the ability to banish him for a few minutes. There is some light combat in Curse of Anabelle, it's in the form of dodging spells and casting spells at the same time using QTE style button timing. For the searching part, fret not it has a mini map which you can access once you find the map (which you do pretty early on) though you'll still have to keep running through the mansion in almost pitch black! I welcomed this design choice which really gives the game its much needed suspense while not leaving you completely helpless like Kholat does. Bear in mind, this is the second game of a truly indie studio that consists of five to six people. So the 3D assets and sound FX it has are used repeatedly throughout the game. It doesn't have perfect animations nor a payed for soundtrack and has mediocre voice acting at best. It also has some sound issues and typos that need to be fixed. Though despite all of its limitations I can see that this game is a fruit of hard gritty dedication of just a few people. PS. I have some additional hours offline. And I kind of rushed through the game, so it might take you just under or above six hours if you save often.

Honestly, I couldn't even get to the puzzles. The game's intro turned me right off. I realize this sounds nitpicky... and it is... but the dialog and presentation were just awful. The characters sound robotic, The voice direction here was either generically terrible or just non-existent. One "news report" early on sounds like the voice actor swallowed his microphone first. And then the first book I picked up contained a note rife with grammatical mistakes. Now.. it's possible the character that wrote the note wasn't an English speaker, but since I don't know anything about the character beyond the note he left, all I can see is a grasp of the English language that is tenuous at best. That note was it for me. Between the bad presentation and that single note, I was done. Game might even be good? But I'll never know that.

I was disappointed with this title. They tried to do something different but it didn't pan out. It starts off seeming to be something that will be good horror but once we arrive at the house we are taunted with a few objects that move and a girl that won't stop screaming. Once the "incident" takes place the game turns into something completely different. I'll break it down for you what most of the game really is: 1. Move around house with no flashlight and press button "F" to magically illuminate your surroundings for a set amount of time before you have to do it all over again and look for items to pick up which highlight when you are magically illuminated. You can also find journal pages explaining the story but if you miss them you are out of luck understanding things. 2. Find the right amount of items to make a seal which will unlock a special door in the house. Go into the next room and hit "B" to select your one book to cast the right spell to go into another realm and fight a boss. There are 32 pages to leaf through and when you find the right one you must press "R" to invoke the spell and take you to the boss fight. 3. The boss fight involves hitting the "A" and "D" buttons trying to move around to avoid the bosses spells but at the same time you will be in a QTE event pressing "Q","E","F", etc. to send spell strikes at the boss. You have to do this a number of times before the boss is down. If you fail to do one QTE button you start from the beginning of the battle. If you are hit just once you are sent back to the real world and must lead again through 32 pages to find the right spell to take you back to do it all over gain. 4. Once you defeat the boss you must now find the next door to unlock. To lengthen the experience, not only will you walk around a large maze like house, you will also at times jump back into the past of the home to access areas you cannot access in your current timeline. 5. You must do this all about 10 times to defeat the final boss with a lackluster ending. It's repetitive, not scary and is just plain boring in my opinion.

Just poor. This game commits so many sins that the unique redeeming qualities of it get drowned out. The main meat of the game is going round a giant mansion, casting your light spell to illuminate items, which you collect and use to craft into seals, which act as keys to access the ritual rooms. Once there you then look up a book, cast a ritual spell and you're teleported to a combat arena in which you quick-time-event down an enemy. So far so decent. But it hits so many stumbling blocks. For starters, combat is terrible. Even fight, even though it's supposedly against a different demon, is the same damn character model every time. There's an unnecessarily long pause at the start of every battle with no purpose whatsoever, it's not like you have to ready spells or swig potions. And if you get stung by even one hit from the enemy, it's game over. Cue overlong loading screen, and then it stupidly PLACES YOU BACK AT THE RITUAL SITE! Where you have to press a button, click a book, scroll through a couple of dozen pages, one turn at a time, and recast the same bloody spell to take you back to the fight. Where you have to suffer through the unnecessarily long pause again. It's beyond infuriating. As well as that, navigating around the mansion gets more and more of a chore the more you unlock ritual sites and open up rooms. You're supposed to have a marker and compass system at the top of the HUD to guide you to the next crafting ingredient or ritual site, but oftentimes that bugged out and didn't work. So you're left just stumbling about the place, trying every door in sight. It doesn't help that the mansion rooms all looks the exact same. And for a game with a strong narrative slant, the protagonist's voice actor is atrocious. His shock at [spoiler]realising he's dead[/spoiler] is hilarious, and he proceeds to grate on you the whole way through. And then the game commits a massive fuck you by suddenly, and spoiler alert, [spoiler]springing a cutscene on you where you get caught and I assume killed by the same demon you've been wiping the floor with, and then fade to black, but oh wait, it was all a story being narrated by some guy to his daughter, Anabelle, with a vague indication that there'll be a part 2[/spoiler]. Absolute kick in the face for the player, but by then I was happy to be done, and thankfully this only took about 3 hours of my time. Also, I generally hover up and read all of the lore in most games, but this game hits you with an absolute glut of it right out the door, so much of it poorly written, with poor spelling and grammar, than I just gave up after a few infuriating pages and never read another thing, not that it seemed to have any bearing on the plot given how sudden it ends. I got this on a deep sale, but I would recommend you avoid this no matter the cost.

Just another indie horror game Horror genre is a favorite among indie developers because of its simplicity in design compared to other genres, but this doesn’t mean that it can be executed properly by any team. Curse of Anabelle (CoA) is an example where we see a passion of storytelling - even though it is uninspiring - that was accompanied with bad design decisions. We’ve seen this before CoA is a first-person horror game. Its story is full of horror cliches and the questionable voice acting does not help. We play as Nathan - whose girlfriend went missing years after her younger sister was found dead near a haunted mansion - and embark on a journey to the haunted mansion to perform exorcisms. Even though there are signs of passion and dedication in the few cinematics it has, character models, animations, and voice acting downplays anything good about the game. There are even some annoying decisions made like the usage of focus in cinematics that hinder the experience and I can’t stress enough how the intro of the game was almost exactly copied from Death Stranding trailers. One positive thing about the presentation would be the jumpscare moments. Apart from being cheap, they were executed well with great special effects and sound design. Let’s get technical CoA is one of those games that is technically problematic but not broken. It didn’t have any issues like occasional crashes, but it would stutter a lot, especially in cutscenes. Various problems like voices not matching facial animations would occur. There are also times when you would wait for a loading screen, watch a short cutscene, walk for a few seconds, and wait again for another loading screen. Character movement feels wonky and you will occasionally step on random objects which gets distracting and annoying. I also noticed that the symbol of the game on the taskbar is the symbol of Unreal Engine which is just sad. Other problems include being forced to adjust the brightness every time you open the game, pausing the game not pausing the dialogue, overlapping textures, and wireless disconnection of earphones crashing the game. Bad design decisions Graphics don’t make a game and CoA is a living proof. It has good environmental design but almost no interaction that is meaningful. Story is presented through cutscenes, dialogue, and reading materials but these are scattered unevenly and there are parts where there are so many things to read through at once that the game basically becomes a book. Many gameplay mechanics like QTE’s, dialogue options, and boss battles exist but they are not presented well enough for the player to understand how the use them or what they need to do. When the game goes into a QTE moment it doesn’t let you know if you are supposed to press, hold, or repeatedly press a button and that is one example. There is almost no reward for exploration other than diary entries that are filled with grammatical errors. Even trying to see the current mission is a chore. You press the ‘Tab’ button and wait seconds before seeing what they are and when you complete a task, there is no visual indication that they are completed which is just unacceptable. UI design is good with a great map mechanic that works well within gameplay, but the UI is a chore to navigate through. After some time of exploring and getting to the mansion, CoA becomes so repetitive that it is almost impossible to enjoy and the fact that the character dies with one hit during boss battles makes me question if we live in a world where the concept of ‘learning curve’ doesn’t exist. CoA is a combination of uninspiring half-cooked mechanics with rare occurrences of good visuals and soundtrack that is accompanied with the worst boss battles I’ve encountered in a long time. Score: 4/10 + Rare occurrences of good visuals and moments - Uninspiring mechanics - Bad voice acting - Repetitive gameplay - Stutters during cutscenes - Bad design choices

I would really prefer to give this game a thumbs in the middle, because my feelings are very mixed. Overall it's mediocre. pros: -Cinematic cutscenes look incredible for an indy developed game -Music is also very nice -The devs obviously put a ton of time into the art/lore of the demons. the detail in solomons book is impressive. -Interesting story/setup Cons: -The in game graphics are pretty average, maybe a bit below average -The game play gets old fast. While I appreciate them trying to do something different, it just ends up feeling repetitive and boring. -The voice acting by the main character is really poor. The person that voices Emily though did a nice job. -The story ended without really being as satisfying as I was hoping. Unless there are alternate endings that I am unaware of. It's possible I just got the bad ending -The scares are pretty limited, was hoping for a bit more Although the gameplay gets repetitive, you can beat the game in about 4 hours, so it ends before it really starts to wear out its welcome. If you can get the game on a 50% off sale, it might be worth giving a try. I've definitely played worse horror games.

I recommend this game, but only on 50% or greater sale. Why? Mostly because it's very short, the QTE is fickle, and mechanics can be glitchy on the higher graphics settings. I'll explain below. <3 Allow me to preface by saying this is a pretty good game. The attention to detail gets an A+, the puzzles were cake, and the spoops were solid. On the highest settings, this game is gorgeous. I felt like I could physically touch the items on my screens and feel their textures if I wanted to. But alas, technology fails me. I digress! A lot of the journal entries could have used some serious scrubbing for grammar. Normally I don't mind, but it was painful to read some of them and I ended skipping some altogether. I had to lower the settings because looting any item would break/freeze the mouse look function entirely. This was forcing me to save and reload anytime I needed to pick something up in order to 'fix' my game. Rolling the settings down to medium completely eliminated the issue, thank goodness. I was going to give up on this game if I had to play by saving/reloading every few minutes. On top of that, the highest resolution this goes to was 1920x1080 and making any changes resulted in the game being stuck in a tiny window until I slapped it with good ol' alt+enter. This was incredibly annoying. Pro-tip: You can adjust the graphics settings without it jumping out of fullscreen mode in game only. If you're at the main menu screen, you'll be plagued by being constantly reverted to windowed mode. And it was probably just me, but every time Emily would start talking, I wanted to punch her in the f*cking throat. I feel like it was a little too convenient that [spoiler] She vanishes after leaving you a note that leads you to a mansion where you die. Afterward, she *uses* your ghost as a means to dispel the evil in the house-- but only because she couldn't contact an angel instead. Well, thanks a lot Emily, I hope you swallow a bag of razor blades. [/spoiler] If you confront her about it, she changes the subject. Rude. I really enjoyed exploring the house and taking my time with the puzzles. There wasn't much of a sense of urgency aside from the moments where you use the warp through time mechanic to look for puzzle pieces. It's a little bit repetitive after the first couple of fights, but I enjoyed knowing what I needed to do to knock those demons out one by one. Sadly, the game ended a little abruptly for me. I had only defeated 6 or 7 when I was led to the final cut scene. This really bummed me out. While I appreciate that you may need to play the game several times to defeat all the demons for the achievements, I feel like $25 is a little steep for such a short experience. Hence, my advise to purchase it on sale. All in all, I like this game. I genuinely hope to see more like this from these Devs. :) Curse of Anabelle! A slow burning horror experience that will curl around you like a warm blanket before smothering you. Rawr <3