If you want to go ape, restore balance and sacrifice some enemies to the Vermillion Shrine, well then Cursed Blood might be the game for you. This new co-op Roguelike is going to have you running around a dreary, rainy, and bloody environment, taking down enemies with a mix of melee and long range combat. Sounds promising, but let's dive more into it!
Cursed, yet Again!
One extremely unique mechanic that I've enjoyed quite a bit in Cursed Blood are the Curses. Every run you go on you have a choice to interact with The Damned Obelisk, which is essentially a checkpoint. Pretty useful right? If you interact with the damned thing, you can get either money, health or removal of a previous curse. And if you're wondering how you got that curse, well you can only get one of these things above in exchange for a random curse being placed on you for the rest of the run. The cost of curse removal also isn't free, since it deals 50% damage to you. Useful, but at a cost.
This Curse Checkpoint system essentially means you are playing with a debuff or choosing to not save before a Boss fight, which I have to say from personal experience is a bad idea. Besides, the Curses do make it more challenging.
What makes it even more fun and aggravating at the same time is how targeted the Curses are towards your current build. Whatever plans I had, the Obelisk could smell it and would immediately hit me with a debuff for it. If I focused on speed, I got hit with Hit Glue, if I improved Charged Attack DMG, I got slapped with Uncharged Attack, and so on. I don't know if that's how it was designed the work or if it's my own pure bad luck, but it's hilarious in any case. I do like to suffer.
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Build Your Own Combat Style
While you might have to work around the Curses to actually have an effective build, there is plenty for you to work with. Boosts at the start of a run are your basis for how you are going to fight, so choose wisely!
Once you've found the Key to the Blood Fountain on level 2, you unlock a whole new level of planning for yourself. The Blood Fountain is a mode which has you killing a bunch of pretty powerful enemies in exchange for two additional Boosts.
If you see that Medicinal Mutations Boost which causes Explosive Barrels to heal you instead of damaging you, grab it immediately. Since healing items are essentially non-existent in the game, this along with the Takedowns is your best way of keeping yourself alive. The rest of the Boosts are up to you and your game style, but Merchant's Favor for a decrease in The Greedy Well prices is also a good choice.
Speaking of, The Greedy Wishing Well is another consistent way of improving your combat throughout a run, along with the Blood Bath. While the Blood Bath usually improves specific Stats, like speed of damage, or increased Takedown Healing, the Well lets you go even further. You can add Burn damage for example, inflict Bleed, increase Damage if you've overhealed yourself, etc. I might like to see the Blood Bath with a bigger variety of boosts, though I understand why it's limited to mostly Stats, considering they appear the most often.
Normal Mode is Good but Takedown Hunt is Goated
Going on a regular run does have a lot of replayability, especially with the variety of Curses, Boosts, and Weapons which you can pick and choose from, but it does begin to be one and the same after a while and you start playing by muscle memory. The other game modes and their modifiers exist for that exact reason.
No other mode has given me such an adrenaline boost than the Takedown Mode. The modifier effects active in this mode increase all player speed, the enemies drop no guns, and takedowns heal 50 % less. The most important part is that you have to do a takedown every 60 seconds or you start losing health.
Seeing that Takedown Timer tick down in the corner of my screen had me locked in and defeating two bosses in record time. I had zero care in the world for checkpoints, hidden chests, and sometimes even enemies. It's good to note that the timer isn't active during boss fights, thankfully, or that would have been tricky, especially with my tactic of waiting out Don Ratticcio and shooting him from a distance until he comes out of his dome shield.
Semi-Open World with Secrets to Spare
In the famous words of All Star, there's ''...so much to do, so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the back streets?'' And honestly, you will want to explore every nook and cranny, backstreets and pipes of Cursed Blood. There's always a hidden chest somewhere, a Skeleton Key for the Wishing Well, or a huge Blood chest waiting for you to upgrade your weapons.
The game more often than not doesn't show you the right way to go. It usually gives you two options and you're the one that has to make a careful choice which way is the right way, then go the other way for that loot. It's definitely worth it, especially for the satisfaction of finding another secret.
I also like how much of the game is interactable. You can break anything and everything, and sometimes you'll even get coins for it. Even grass can be cut if you are swinging through it. If the future biomes are of the same caliber, then I will definitely be happy.
It's Early Access, Should I Play It?
The team behind Cursed Blood is committed to working with the community to make the game as best as it can be. That means more content, balancing, and an ending once Early Access is done. If you don't mind that there isn't a clear goal which you are working towards other than getting better, or getting stuck in a bug that forces you to take burn damage for over a minute and restart your run (not salty at all), then I say this game is a good roguelike choice.
There's still lots to do, lots to interact with (and break for coins), as well as lots of Curses to suffer through. The enemies are varied and the world is beautifully designed, it just lacks that little bit more of content. If you'd much prefer a finished game, then I suggest waiting for it to come out of Early Access and check our updated review then!
Hristina is the Assigning Editor for Pro Game Guides with a Master's degree in English Language, Literature and Culture from the University of Belgrade. She's written blogs, anime quizzes, books, as well as worked as a Content Editor before starting at PGG as a Staff Writer. She lives, breathes and often screams for the horror genre. If a game has multiplayer, be sure that she is playing it, like Dead by Daylight, PEAK, R.E.P.O. and Marvel Rivals. Hristina's comfort games are Outlast, Last of Us, and Until Dawn, which she has played or watched other people play more than 10 times each.