Curses 'N Chaos

My first few minutes with Curses 'N Chaos felt like being swarmed at a bus stop by everyone I'd ever wronged. Goblins rush from the left, frogs launch from offscreen right, skeletons absorb hits and keep walking, and somewhere in the back of your skull you can already hear the Grim Reaper's footsteps. Tribute Games built a wave-based arena brawler around a beautifully cruel loop: you and fellow bounty hunter Leo or Lea have exactly 60 seconds per wave to clear the screen, or Death himself materialises and hunts you down in a single touch. Thirteen stages, ten waves each, one boss to cap every stage off. That structure is the whole game, and whether it grips you or exhausts you depends almost entirely on how much you enjoy reading enemy choreography like sheet music. The combat toolkit is deliberately compact. You get a punch, an uppercut, a jump-kick, and a double-jump to weave with. What looks thin reveals surprising texture once you realise that attack timing shifts the move that comes out, and that chaining hits without getting struck yourself improves your loot drops from enemies, turning copper coins into money bags and gems. That combo economy feeds directly into Allison the alchemist's crafting system: between rounds, you spend collected gold on items or combine them using a Grimoire that maps ingredient relationships. Clovers extend your combo multiplier, horseshoes double it, hourglasses buy precious extra seconds before Death shows up at the boss door. Learning what to craft and when to spend it is a quieter layer of strategy sitting underneath the mayhem, and it rewards the kind of player who actually reads tooltips. The visual craft here is genuinely lovely. Tribute's 8-bit pixel work has a slightly desaturated palette that sets it apart from the brighter retro crowd, and the backgrounds, though static, are illustrated with real care. Cutscenes carry the flair of Paul Robertson's distinctive style. The chiptune soundtrack deserves particular attention: it has the propulsive, slightly gothic energy that sits somewhere between classic Castlevania and Kirby, and it keeps the adrenaline dialled just right across sessions that would otherwise feel repetitive. A player on NeoGAF noted they had been "yapping about the soundtrack to this game for months to anyone who'll listen" - that kind of word-of-mouth cult is exactly the soundtrack's target. Here is where honesty matters, though. Solo play is a legitimate struggle. The enemy waves are tuned for two bodies on screen, so going alone means getting cornered faster, managing item inventory solo with no backup, and feeling the difficulty spike hit harder than it should around stage five when enemy behaviors turn genuinely erratic. The single-player experience is survivable for patient, skilled players, but several reviewers noted the game loses real appeal without a co-op partner. There is also a friction point that aged poorly: restarting a stage for score-chase purposes requires quitting the game entirely and relaunching, which kills the impulse to keep grinding. Late-game enemies lean on reskins of earlier types with higher health totals rather than truly new behaviors, which flattens the sense of discovery past the midpoint. If you have a couch co-op partner, the calculus shifts noticeably. Two players splitting the screen's chaos makes item collection practical, combo maintenance manageable, and the whole experience becomes the arcade-style throwback Tribute clearly intended. It is not a long game if you are good at it, and replayability is mostly limited to high-score chasing and achievement hunting. But within that focused scope, Curses 'N Chaos knows exactly what it is and executes it with craft. Approach it with realistic expectations and the right company, and those short, frantic sessions will stick with you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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