Cursed Crown (NES Indie Review)

Cursed Crown
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January 28, 2024
Designed by Martin Reimer
Free to Play – Pay What You Want at Itch.io

It looks the part. The mechanics are there to play the part. So, what happened?

I like the Adventures of Lolo. There’s a franchise that’s screaming for a comeback. Apparently I’m not alone in that belief. Despite having no presence in modern gaming at all (besides Lolo and Lala being semi-regular bosses in the Kirby franchise under the names), the franchise known as Eggerland in Japan is one of the most influential on the indie scene. Cursed Crown is a little different because it’s actually on the NES and free to play if you have an hour to kill. There’s no deaths and the game has simple puzzle rules that mostly revolve around gaps and the things that can be used to fill the gaps. Puzzle games without tension are fine. Sokoban (aka Boxxle for Game Boy owners) is in that category and if that floats your boat, so be it. For me, I don’t need action, but if the puzzles don’t challenge me, I just become kind of bored. That’s sadly what happened with Cursed Crown.

This is one of the final levels of the game, and there’s really very little “puzzle” here. This is like a world one level in a normal puzzle game, only it’s appearing in the home stretch of this game. It really feels like the puzzle logic just sputters out during the end game.

Now, developer Martin Reimer is a hell of a guy, but Cursed Crown needs a lot of work. When it plays well, and by that I mean it has puzzles that you actually have to study the screen and plot out your moves, it’s a damn good game. Unfortunately, there’s maybe 3 or 4 levels in a 41 stage game that are like that, where I had to actually restart the stage because I made the wrong moves. Most of the other stages feel either like tutorial levels or opening world stages. You play as a prince turned into a frog that has to collect gems and enter a door. You move one full character space at a time and the main puzzle element typically involves gaps. The gaps can be filled with both pots and blocks. Some of the spaces become gaps after you step on them once. These are all boilerplate Lolo-like tropes for a reason: they work. So do levels with ice where, once you step on the ice, you can’t stop yourself from sliding in a straight line until you hit something. Again, old hat but a classic for a reason. Sometimes there’s locked doors (but not THE door) that you have to get a key. More than once, I finished a stage with spare keys. A lot of the levels have multiple outs, which works for a game like Baba is You, but here, it’s just too loose of puzzle design.

Again, this would be fine for an early stage. This is level 28 of 41, and there’s NO PUZZLE! It’s just an unobstructed path to the finish line. A puzzle game can’t do that type of thing.

The biggest letdown is that Cursed Crown doesn’t save its hardest puzzles for the end. In fact, the homestretch was so easy that it kind of feels like the game was rushed along to the conclusion. I went backwards to see which was the last level where I had to stop and think about what I was going to do. It was level 29 of 41, and even that stage wasn’t that hard. Cursed Crown is like playing a decent proof of concept that has multiple placeholders for rooms that are still being workshopped. The good news is the game is free to download, and the mechanics are solid enough that the potential is here for something really good. It’s just not there yet. What’s out now is too easy, and easy puzzle games are just boring. I’m sure it can’t be a cinch to create elaborate puzzles with one specific solution. But, as an indie game that has no fixed release date, Martin has all the time in the world to come up with them. He’s clearly capable, since a handful of levels in Cursed Crown are genuinely solid. He might want to rethink some of the mechanics. Like how both jars AND blocks can permanently fill a gap in the floor. What if one was a permanent fill while the other was only a temporary one? Or what if the lily pads moved when you stepped on them? Again, this feels like a good proof of concept, but it never evolves past that.

There’s too many tutorial levels as well. I would condense them into a single room that queues you through each gimmick.

The other possible way to look at Cursed Crown, and I don’t mean this as an insult at all: this is actually pretty good as a younger child’s first puzzle game. I had Sasha, my soon to be 9 year old niece, give Cursed Crown a shot. In the event I die, I’ve told my family that Sasha gets Indie Gamer Chick and The Pinball Chick. Don’t roll your eyes. Sasha is already a multi-time Pinball FX world record holder on a variety of tables, including some of the more competitive Williams tables. With Aunt Cathy’s help, she’s even written a few parts of our Pinball FX reviews. She’s also been my playing partner for brawlers lately. So she’s no slouch at games, but she’s also never played a game like this before. So, I passed her the controller, then just sat back and watched. She liked Cursed Crown. She liked the Prince Charming angle. She liked the simple mechanics that didn’t overwhelm and were easy to understand. For her, Cursed Crown worked as a good confidence builder to ease her into a new-for-her genre. That’s not nothing, at least in my book. I can’t give it YES! because I spent most of my playtime waiting for the game to beef-up and it never really happened. The best thing I can say about Cursed Crown is that I enjoyed watching my niece work out the simple puzzles and was happy that it ultimately stoked her interest in one of my favorite genres. That counts for something, but it’s not something I can really take into consideration when making a decision based on my experience. I hope he keeps working on it. We need more Lolo-likes in the world.
Verdict: NO!