There’s a problem with the blood, and it’s this: the blood is cursed. It runs through industrial pipelines and powers machinery. It’s stored up in great vials, and manifests troubling shrines. Inevitably, it’s also spilled all over the floor in your wake.
Welcome to co-op melee roguelike Cursed Blood, in which you and your team of four samurai apes brandishing katanas make your way through what developer David Marquardt calls a ‘bloodpunk’ world, populated by anthropomorphised animals with regional English accents. For reasons that are left unexplained during this version of the game, they deserve a swift and ignominious death.
And as you deal out that death, you grow more powerful, because – and I’m not sure if I mentioned this already – this blood is cursed. This being a roguelike, you begin your run by picking a random buff from a choice of three. Delve deeper into levels and you’ll find shrines that offer you further buffs, some of which force you to pick up a curse (a debuff, basically). Wishing wells grant you still more of these options in exchange for coins. You journey, you kill, you grow stronger.
The first thing that strikes you is the pace of movement and attack. It’s a zippy game, this one, and that instantly puts you in a Samurai’s mindset. You’re able to sprint short distances and move at tremendous speed while executing dodges. Your attacks are flurried and brutal and can be comboed, meaning lone enemies aren’t much of a challenge.
Sneaking up on them while they’re in an unaware state and executing them replenishes some of your health, however, so it pays not to barrel into a combat arena. It’s better instead to edge tentatively towards the edge of the screen and reveal who you’re about to encounter, then look for angles that let you sneak up behind them and harvest some of their haemoglobin.
Red faction
The world and its characters are an odd mix. It’s a distinct combination of elements from other co-op brawlers, and in fact from just about any other game, and it’s clear that the developer’s put some thought into crafting a distinct place for your melee atrocities to take place in. The time period is unclear. Like many ‘-punk’ settings, it could be taking place in the late 1800s or in the near future, such is the combination of sooty industrial machinery and impossible technology.
What role the animal enemies play in this world is left unclear, but they appear to be members of an organised crime outfit whose intention is to control the valuable resource that is the titular Cursed Blood. The preview build begins with a brief cutscene in which worried cockney woodland creatures swear at each other about their clandestine operations and their bosses, setting a foul-mouthed tone that even Kingpin: Life of Crime would give an approving nod at. These underlings are distributed liberally through the world, in small groups of two or three for the first half-hour before arriving in more considerable mobs as you progress deeper and make it past the first ‘skill check’ boss, a walrus with a massive machine gun and an even bigger health bar called Tony Tuskadero.
There’s some decent variety and dynamism to the fights, thanks to that enemy distribution and the incentive to sneak up on them and execute them for a health refill. Adding another winkle still is the variety of enemy types, including vole-like mobs who offer very little resistance and can be dispatched in a couple of attack inputs, and burly mammals carrying lead pipes whose attacks can stagger you and take considerably more health away.
These heavier attacks have a couple of warning frames which show their area of effect for a half-second before they’re launched, which gives you a window to react and either block them or dodge away before launching your riposte. Just like the stealthy executions, that considered and well-timed defense to attack combat sequence does a great job of making you feel like a samurai, simian or otherwise.
Every roguelike has its thorn
So, how does your character get more powerful as the run progresses? Via the blood shrines, you’ve got a few different routes to take. I encountered attack speed buffs, attack power buffs, effect buffs (enemies bleed every 3 seconds, for example) or weapon buffs. During my first run I focused entirely on building up attack speed, which was great against gangs of apples-and-pears woodland creatures but entirely ineffective in boss fights, which are designed with very tight attack windows in this chunk of demo gameplay. Unfortunately by starting buff was three seconds of invulnerability after killing an enemy, which was also incredible in common-or-garden brawls but nullified in the boss fights.
So I died. And then again. And a third and final time. This is a roguelike, after all, so after three deaths it’s back to the start with you.
On run two, I tried to engineer a more balanced build from the RNG. An attack damage buff here, a health buff there. It was on this run that my appreciation and frustration with the level layouts solidified. There’s a pleasing verticality to Cursed Blood’s isometric environs, and your zippy way of traversing storage containers and over gaps is consistently fun. On the other hand, despite the idiosyncratic bits of the game world and setting, this bloodpunk world feels a bit stock. A bit, as Joe Mourinho might say, of the bottle.
The shipping crates and quasi-Victorian industrial architecture could be dropping in for a visit from any number of games from the last fifteen years. Together with a character design aesthetic that’s indistinct from LoL, Dota or any hero shooter you care to name, these visual components leave you feeling like you’re playing a capital V Videogame.
I’d have liked to see Marquardt extend the conceptual eccentricity of the premise – samurai apes, gangster voles, blood that is famously cursed and used to power an industrial world – to the visual depiction of it all. A more singular, sharply drawn version of this game with some artistic curveballs might be something we’d keep talking about long after its release. As it stands, when you’re playing Cursed Blood you’re here for the gameplay. The visuals are readable and not unattractive, but generic.
Bossing it
Also during the second run, I achieved a more balanced build that could finally take down the aforementioned Tony Tuskadero. His is a well designed encounter of the sort you’ve conquered before, but no less satisfying for the familiarity of his boss fight tropes. His first phase is all about dodging the machine gun fire and charge attacks, and waiting for the few frames (and audio cue) in which he’s reloading and thus vulnerable to attack.
Phase two begins with him disappearing to set a mob of underlings on you, then returning in invulnerable form as he’s powered by three energy beam-emitting doohickeys. Destroy those, and you’re onto the final cycle of that pattern.
How well Cursed Blood escalates those design principles in the full release remains to be seen. It’d be fantastic to see not just familiar elements done well, as they appear in this version, but some genuinely leftfield combat encounters and some clear reasons to get you thinking about specific character builds and the interplay between your co-op party’s specialities as you progress.
Cursed Blood is due out in Steam Early Access from 2 April. A free demo is available now.
