A neat concept can’t save Cursed Feed from being a tedious game.
A few months ago I reviewed Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue, a horror escape room combination that I wasn’t all that impressed with. I mention this because the house that one chapter from that game takes place in is the exact same house as you’ll be spending 90% of Cursed Feed in. The more budget horror games you play, the easier bought assets become to spot. That in itself is fine, but Cursed Feed just isn’t all that interesting a game, as you spend most of your time trying to find what you’re meant to interact with next rather than learning of a terrifying tale or surviving the horrors of a haunted house.
You play as a paranormal investigator heading to the Thornton house where, not so long ago, the patriarch of the family murdered everyone in the home before taking his own life. Neighbours have since reported ghostly activities, so you’re there to find out just how haunted the house is. You’ll use cameras, voice detectors, and your own eyes to try to figure out what went on.
Upon arrival, you’ll need to set up cameras around the house to monitor all the goings on. Your first walkthrough reveals an awful lot of blood. And I mean buckets of the stuff. You can’t move five feet without finding another pool of human jam on the floor. If the father did murder his wife, child, and himself, then he did so in every single room multiple times. Anyway, the copious amounts of crimson do a fairly good job of making the home feel quite unsettling, as does the solid use of lighting.
Once you’ve set up your eight cameras, it’s back to the van to see if anything happens. Now, here’s my first problem. I legitimately thought my game was bugged as absolutely nothing happened for a good fifteen minutes as I watched each camera for a solid minute or more each, trying to spot something spooky. Absolutely nothing happened, so I quit, deleted my save, and started over. I ran into the same issue. After looking up a quick guide, it turned out that you just have to cycle through the cameras over and over until something happens and you have to go into the house and look at it for yourself. There’s no point sitting and watching, as the next event is triggered by you looping through the different feeds five times.
This felt really quite contrived, as there were all sorts of opportunities to make use of the environment here. You’ll hear bumps, bangs, and static as you cycle the cameras, so surely finding the source of those noises would be a good way to progress events. Instead, these are just, admittedly solid, ambient sounds that don’t really mean anything. A wasted opportunity to my mind.
The spooky scenes are a mixed bag. Some of them are some basic flickering lights or some blood trickling from the ceiling, which are fine, if generic. The interesting ones were when seemingly live-action footage was placed into the action. I really liked this, as it evoked campy horror games like The 7th Guest and Night Trap from years gone by. I particularly liked the woman appearing in the mirror and the ghost at the window later in the game.
These are the few high points in this stage of the game. Eventually you get trapped in the house and have to find telephones and TV screens to progress the plot. You’ll get a couple of jump scares, but the whole live action footage is out of the window here. It culminates with you looking through some catacombs for ghostly voices before you escape to an unsatisfying conclusion and a sequel set up.
I don’t like complaining about a small, budget, indie title created by a very small team, as making a game isn’t the easiest task I imagine. Cursed Feed just isn’t all that fun to play. The setup of using cameras to observe the house before investigating in person is interesting enough, and putting real footage into a 3D game is something you really don’t see very often, so I commend the ambition there. But the whole thing doesn’t come together in an enjoyable way, and feels as though it’s a nice idea with a series of half-baked mechanics. Some of the voice work is nice, and the blood effects are really quite solid, but beyond that, this is a pass from me.
Cursed Feed is available now on Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
