Cursed Hours Reviews

Badly optimized, buggy and trojan warnings. Just...No. Sorry.

Day 24 of the October Horror Reviews: Cursed Hours Indie horror has come quite a ways, and there are a lot of voices that are hoping to be heard among the droves of fledgling devs out there. I think with the advent of games like P.T., Amnesia, Outlast, Five Nights, etc. Everyone's looking for their niche, and the golden ticket to the path to success - be that fame or infamy. Cursed Hours feels like the kind of game that took a bunch of assets and merged them into a small task management walking sim with a few scripted events. There's not a lot of heart to it, it feels short and fairly inconsequential, and I know I'm being harsh here, but I have to just point out why I find this to be a little unappealing: It's not really doing anything original. Doesn't add anything to the formula, nor does it try to be that different from its peers. Regular haunted house, which feels underwhelming. I can definitely appreciate the effort that went into it, but it's a short game, and not only that but while the puzzles aren't that difficult, they also feel under-telegraphed, and as though they have a lot of little bugs where you do something the wrong way, or in the wrong order and it messes with the way the game is scripted. Graphically, it's fairly average, and sound-wise, it creates a natural, gentle ambience followed by haunting sound effects that create an unsettling atmosphere. I will say that's one thing the game does have: Despite the scripted nature of the scares, despite the slightly thin story and the fact that the house burglar thought "i'm scared of the dark while i'm robbing this house so might as well switch all the lights on", I will say that the atmosphere was actually pretty compelling. I liked the build-up, as short as it was. There's potential here, potential for growth even through the roughness. In the meantime, keep digging for that diamond, as this one isn't exactly it yet. It looks poignancy and grace: But the dev has a chance here. Keep at it. 3.8/10

This developer should be ashamed of selling such crap on Steam. It's only four bucks, so I can let it go, but still. This is a janky buggy awful experience. I knew it would be bad when encountering the huge mansion and going around the back only to find that it has no backdoor. Like at all. Really? There is only one door to enter the mansion and that's the front door, which is beyond unrealistic. Then when you pick open the front door and enter, your character says "sh@ttttt (spelled with multiple t's) my lock pick is broke." Then when you immediately open this same door to go back outside, he says the same exact thing, which makes zero sense. I knew we were off to a bad start after that. Then the lights are disabled and you apparently only have a matter of minutes to find batteries for the flashlight. If you don't find them (which I never did), you are stuck standing around in pitch darkness with the only option of having to restart from the last checkpoint. Other bugs I encountered was a street light outside the mansion just floating in the air with no attached light pole and a half body apparition of some sorts just standing against the kitchen wall. This game also suffers from poor optimization because I was getting constant frame rate drops with an RTX4080 in 4k resolution no matter what I selected in the graphic options. Overall, this was a terrible cheap low budget experience in my opinion. I would recommend not wasting time with this one.