Souno's Curse Reviews

I had this game on my wishlist for 3 and a half months, waiting for some patches as the initial reception was pretty poor. I was willing to hold hope that they could fix the game and make a fun experience as the art style and character design are undeniably charming. For the most part the devs at Kiro team did just that with a few asterisks. Souno's curse is not a perfect game, it has a lot of issues but it's one of those cases where the positives outweigh the negatives, hence the recommendation. The biggest issue is the difficulty curve due to a lack of healing and some clunky controls paired with tough level design. Getting hit in Souno's curse deals about 1/4th of your health initially with no way to heal except for resting at a bonfire. There's sections that go on for a long time between checkpoints which feel very frustrating without any way to recover health. The 1st biome is pretty fine in regards to this but the 2nd biome especially becomes an exercise in frustration. Funnily enough the 3rd biome is a lot easier again, leading to an uneven difficulty curve. I'm not saying they should make the 3rd biome harder, just that the 2nd one could use some revisions. The game is filled with traps in every room, making it almost feel like 'white palace - the game' in a way. The problem here is that the platforming feels bad because the wall climb only lasts for a split second with no visual indicator. The character is pretty floaty and some jumps require pixel perfect outputs. Getting hit by a trap deals one fourth of your health and send you back to the last arbitrarely chosen 'safe spot'. Paired with no healing this makes for some frustrating sections. Sometimes enemies are strewn inbetween these to further add frustration but most often the traps are your biggest enemy. Still though the enemies aren't that bad but the combat as a whole isn't anything to write home about especially during boss encounters which are easily the game's biggest weakness. The 1st boss is a bit of a difficulty spike but not that much and both the 3rd & final boss were fine but once again the 2nd boss was just horrible. It's not that it's too tanky given how few hits you yourself can take but also the fact that it's woefully inconsistent. The boss has a few very varied attacks but each of them can last a short while or a VERY long time. Sometimes it comes out slowly but other times it's so fast it feel impossible to dodge. I ragequit the game 5 times at this boss and i think that about an hour of my gametime was spent at this A-hole. The wors thing is that each boss has a 2nd phase at critical health which is only a few hits more but turns into a panic fest that's hard to parse. I nearly refunded the game at this point but stuck with it and i'm glad i did as the game became quite fun afterwards again. Especially thanks to the game's latest patch which added a minimap as well as visual indicators for missed collectibles. A huge QoL feature that drastically improves the game experience and one i'm grateful for. I think a few more patches are needed, mostly balancing and some tightening of controls but it's getting there. I'd also like to see the upgrades made a bit cheaper as i had to grind for money for 20 minutes at the end to max out. Also removing the point of no return at the end would do a lot, as those are a big NO for me. Luckily it's signposted very well at the very least. I've spoken mostly about the game's weaknesses so far but there's some strenghts too. Once you've learned the controls and unlocked every movement upgrade, backtracking for missed collectibles becomes kinda fun. The visuals are also very good throughout and kind of the main reason i played the game in the first place. The main character design is also very cute & charming so that's a big plus too. The music was fine, nothing amazing at all but not annoying either, boss soundtracks were kind of exciting even! The story was pretty generic though, with some pretty poor writing and a few grammatical mistakes. Ofcourse not everyone's English is top notch, i would even bet that my review has quite a bit of mistakes but with the ease of access to AI & translation tools it may be worthwhile to revise some lines. Especially the statues at the central gate were a bit, cringe. Finally on a technical level i encountered 2 crashes and one minor bug but no lag so for the most part the game works. It has some pain points in regards to balancing and controls, but the visual charm outshine most of that, so it's just good enough to recommend.