There are very few interactions with NPCs, and what is there is limited to a few pre-canned scenes with no choices involved.Ī more recent take on this type of game is Accidental Woman, which retains most of the flaws of its predecessors and adds happiness mechanics that make you constantly kill yourself if you don't follow some non-obvious paths to avoid it. Everything feels arbitrary and changes come on suddenly and without warning. Reading a couple of magazines and putting on some higher heels cures you of shyness. One day you can find the game has declared your character 'shy', despite the reason you're wearing dowdy clothes is that you have no money.

It really says that, or something very close to it. And in Cursed, the sex scenes aren't even written most of the time! Not just sex, but many other important or potentially interesting scenes were never written and are just 'Blah blah placeholder.'. you labor away hoping something interesting will happen, but when it does it comes out of nowhere, you don't get any meaningful choices and it's virtually game-ending. And in both games, most of the time those actions are incredibly mundane and uneventful, and sometimes, rarely, very rarely, something weird happens that takes the hours of time you spent grinding boring mundane chores and turns everything upside down, and the next thing you know you're being gang-raped by an entire crack-house of junkies, or you're dead, or you're a cat! Cursed has that kind of mechanic. GL and Cursed are both fixated on simulating tedious details of day to day actions of normal life. Girl Life has a lot of loving followers who probably find that statement absurd, so I'll be more specific. It seems to lean heavily on ideas from Girl Life, which IMHO is fundamentally composed of tiny needles of sheer horror hidden within a massive haystack of pure boredom. Neither game has the whole Cursed package.Ĭursed was probably awesome back when it was written, but things have moved on. Hard Times in Hornstown is probably the best game with a lot in common with Cursed, and No Money Down Blues is probably the most obvious example of copying the thoughts-create-transforms approach, and is a far more fun and interesting game - flawed in some ways, but not as flawed as Cursed. They have a nicer user-interface, and usually more and better things to do. Some take on more of the Cursed concept than others. you invest hours and hours in grind to eventually get different irreversible outcomes, many of which are only accessible at random.Ī few games have copied this kind of thing since. A single encounter with a dominant can turn you into a submissive doormat. The slightest stray thought can turn you into a freak. This is complicated by the oddity that you are transformed by the slightest whim or thought.

A rather sad, lonely, normal life at that, because there are very few characters you can form any kind of relationship with. The basic premise is that you're instantly transformed into a woman and have to live a normal life. While Cursed does an OK job of working around it, RAGS is never helping, and the navigation systems constantly annoys. It has not aged well, and it was never ideal for these kinds of games in the first place. If there's one thing that leaps out about Cursed in the tail end of 2020, it's that RAGS is horrible.

Curseed cleanx