Curse in our heads

I have a soft spot for the quietest corners of Steam, and Curse in our heads sits deep in one of them. Dankov Games released this 2D point-and-click adventure in 2018 with almost no fanfare, no press coverage, and a community page that is largely silent. That kind of obscurity is almost its own genre now, and the question worth asking is whether the silence is deserved or accidental. The setup is lean and genuinely atmospheric in premise: John Brown, a retired detective with three decades of spotless case history, receives an anonymous letter drawing him to a psychiatric hospital on a remote island. The mystery is not pitched at you with cinematic bravado. There are no jump-cut trailers or voiced cutscenes. Instead the game drops you into 2D pixel corridors and asks you to observe, talk to hospital staff, hunt for room keys, crack codes, and piece together what the institution is hiding. The pixel art aesthetic is described by the developer as modern, and while Dankov Games is a one-person shop working within obvious budget constraints, the sincerity of the handcraft comes through. Settings like isolated hospitals carry their own ambient weight, and the game leans on that rather than competing with it. The mechanics sit squarely in classic point-and-click adventure territory, closer to old Lucasarts-adjacent quest logic than anything action-adjacent. You search rooms, collect items, speak to staff to unlock fragments of the narrative, and solve code-based puzzles to progress deeper into the hospital. There are 10 Steam Achievements, and the community has produced at least one full walkthrough guide, suggesting the puzzles can genuinely stump players without guidance. The Steam Community page also shows a global update and a handful of bug fixes pushed post-launch, including one that patched a black screen at the ending and another that fixed a looping box bug, which tells you both that the developer cared enough to follow up and that the original build had some rough edges. Who is this actually for? Honest answer: a very specific kind of player. If you grew up on early adventure games and feel at home spending an hour clicking methodically through a small, hand-built world, this scratches that itch. If you need production polish, a voiced protagonist, or a game that tells you where to go next, you will feel the budget limitations sharply. The writing carries the texture of a non-native English speaker working carefully but not always smoothly, which is either endearing or distracting depending on your tolerance. The runtime is short, fitting comfortably into the sub-five-hour tier, which means if the world clicks with you, it ends before it outstays its welcome, which is one of the quiet virtues a longer game can never guarantee. The honest framing here is this: Curse in our heads is a curiosity with a real sense of place, not a polished product. It has the bones of a decent one-shot mystery adventure, the pixel art holds a gloomy institutional mood, and the psychiatric hospital setting gives it a slightly unsettling undertone that the game does not fully exploit but does not squander either. Approach it the way you might approach a hand-painted zine found at the back of a used bookshop: lower your expectation for production, raise your appreciation for intent.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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