As a fan of twin-stick shooters, roguelikes, and rewarding challenges of pretty well all kinds, I’m always down for something new that checks those boxes. What can be fun in the space is that in general roguelikes have a tendency to have an unpredictable quality to them, with random periodic power-ups ideally making each run a bit unique. But what if you modify the formula quite a bit further, and instead of getting to choose which perk you’d like to help you out moving forward, you’re more often required to pick a curse that will work to thwart you instead? If that sounds good to you, then Curse Rounds may be your jam.

Going with a more subdued black-and-white overall look, don’t let this game fool you. It won’t take you long to get the general hang of things, outside of some of its small quirks, but once you begin making choices you’ll quickly get an idea of what may be in store for you. Whereas most games of this kind will have you picking new weapons or skills to help you get further as you level up, in this case you’ll generally just be given nothing but bad choices, needing to roll with the punches and simply try to survive. The one bright spot is that as you defeat the game’s bosses you will finally get a positive perk to work with, ideally helping to undo some of the damage you’ve done to yourself, but depending on the combinations you’ve been forced to opt into, you’ll absolutely get varying results.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some sort of hook in the game to get you invested in taking your curses like a pro, weathering every storm to just see how far you can get. The problem is that it doesn’t feel like the developers’ thought processes got that far, instead content to hobble you at every turn with a fair variety of issues to deal with, that range from simple stat-based pain to quite a number of highly-distracting effects. For me I think it’s the distracting elements that I tended to dislike the most, not so much because of the difficulty, but because they just made the experience harder to enjoy. Throw in generally underwhelming weapon pick-ups and there’s not a lot of excitement to offset the trouble.

I love a good challenge, but the key to that phrase is the inclusion of the word good. Something only being challenging for its own sake, and not throwing you some kind of bone to keep you engaged and persevering ends up being a problem. What’s the carrot meant to be helping pull me along, because after a while a steady diet of only stick gets kind of old. For me, that’s where the experience falls apart. Piling on challenges only works if you convince people they want to stick with it for what they get in return. Perhaps difficulty for its own sake is enough for some people, but it doesn’t make for a great general strategy for success.