Don’t you love it when it turns out your ancestors made a deal with the devil and forgot to give you any sort of warning? In Kurat, 100 years have passed since that agreement, the Devil has shown up to collect. Luckily, they simply want to play a game.
You, and up to three others, take on the role of the household. Each of you picks a character, from farmhand to cat, which each has its own speed, strength and life stats. From there Kurat — Estonian for Devil, Damn, or various other curse forms — plonks you at a desk, with the devil dealing cards out to you. Each of the cards in the deck has a pattern on them that symbolises a struggle or event that you have to face. These can range from protecting certain areas of the open, top-down map, to having to defeat specific enemies. There are also choices too, and sometimes your generosity and forgiveness are rewarded rather than punished.
Kurat‘s setting is birthed from Estonian myth, with challenges based around The Plague Personified and fighting The Devil’s Minions; but what really stood out to me most during my time playing it was how the developers used space and scale to add a sense of the unknown to each of the challenges. While in one of the trials, you and your family members each start out as a tiny character, often in a wheat field. You’re a tiny piece of the screen, in fact, a couple of console generations back you’d have had to be a single-pixel dot, due to resolutions. Enemies, where applicable, are rarely much larger and often move in erratic ways — those that are larger, like giant killer frogs, are incredibly dangerous due to their size. It’s unsettling and makes for quite a tense experience.
You’ve got to keep an eye on your health, of course, but you’ve also got to watch your stamina. If you let that run down then you’ll take more damage, which is a very quick way to end your run. Stamina isn’t used through running, nope. it’s used by attacking and by winding up your attack. This might make it sound like it’s somewhat easy to preserve, but that’s not the case, because your weapons are operated by an analogue stick. Push the analogue stick out to the right and the blade appears to your right, rotate it around to the left via the top and you create a 180-degree arc. Damage is dealt only based on the weapon’s movement (who runs into a sword to be hurt by it?), so you’ll need to either anticipate the enemy or wiggle the stick frantically when enemies are nearby.
I played through Kurat‘s demo while at Insomnia68 and really enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure what to expect at first, but it turned out to be a really fun, tense cooperative game stuffed with a decent variety of events and situations. At one point we carefully crafted a little golem helper after giving him a warm place to stay, and other times we narrowly survived encounters by carefully using and swapping items. It turned out that Kurat was actually a surprisingly deep co-op experience.
Kurat is in development for PC, with no current launch date.
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