Thank you to Colorgrave for sending us this game to review!

Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils is a 2D platformer from indie dev studio Colorgrave. Colorgrave have made a name for themselves developing several well-polished, interesting games that understand the scope they can achieve and generally have some very good ideas and execution. Curse Crackers is another of their titles that fit this description. Right from the start, you’re dropped into a tale of how their world was created and the mythos behind it: a great dragon once wrestled with light to form the world, and created seven daughters from seven of its scales. These were each gifted their own talents and personalities, assigned to protect the world their mother had created, and went on to develop their own races and cultures. In time, however, they no longer saw eye-to-eye. When one of the daughters grew content with malice towards the others, the scales devolved into war until their mother returned and erased her rebelling daughter and all its children. Once the cutscene ends, you’re introduced to the game’s main character, Belle, as well as her bell-shaped assistant, Chime. The game gives you a short movement tutorial before heading out to a date with a knight named Clyde. Unfortunately, it seems an old friend from childhood, Bonnie, has decided to kidnap Belle’s boyfriend, and now you’ve got to track her down across the world to get him back.

Belle was once an acrobat in a circus, and so the game’s movement is heavily derived from that. Belle has your normal platforming standards like running, jumping, and using ladders, but the game has an extensive movement kit. By holding down before jumping, you can do an even higher jump than usual, and by pressing diagonally in a direction to slide before jumping, you can do a massive horizontal long jump. It has the same kind of jump interactivity as Cuphead, where you can bounce off objects while jumping to gain more height or keep yourself in the air. Puzzles and enemies both make use of this, requiring you to bounce on them to break targets or defeat enemies. You can also throw Chime vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, allowing you to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, or perform even more movement options. If you throw Chime below you, you can bounce off him to gain more height; and if you throw him diagonally into a corner, you can catch him as he’s bouncing back to gain a ton of momentum horizontally and vertically to span a gap. Some enemies or platforms require you to use Chime on them before you can interact or jump off them, so even when not using him for movement, you’ll frequently be using Chime to help clear a path, or make a way where there wasn’t one. Each level also has a goal at the end that you have to hit with Chime to complete.

There are a lot of collectibles to be found throughout the game based on the challenge you want to impose on yourself. Each level has three roses hidden somewhere in the stage that might require a keen eye, testing invisible walls, or pulling off hard platforming techniques to reach. You can also do break-the-target minigames in each stage to earn a token, with other tokens coming from beating a level quickly, hitting the goal from far away, or beating a level without taking any damage. By the time I’d beaten the game, I’d still only gotten 33% completion without avoiding collectibles, so it’s safe to say there’s a challenge here for those who love the game and want to 100% it.

This is heavily reflected in the level design. Earlier parts of the game are built around the basics of movement and using Chime. They, admittedly, feel a bit dull or boring due to the simplicity of the stages and the relatively simple graphics and setting. However, as you get deeper into the game, it really starts to test your knowledge of its movement system and expects you to rise to the challenge. Enemies start becoming more than “hit them and they explode”; the game expects you to understand all of the tools in your kit and how to combine them to clear gaps or heights, and the puzzles continue to increase in difficulty. The latter half of the game is where the designers of Curse Crackers really hit their stride, the movement system just clicked, and I felt compelled to keep seeing what each new stage had in store.

Previously touching upon it, the pixel art in this game starts off fairly plain in the first zone. The game is heavily inspired by Game Boy Color/Advance titles with small character sprites, a limited perspective and color palette, and crushed dialogue portraits and fonts. As you get further in, however, the sprites and color palettes really start to evolve. Backgrounds become more detailed and stand out from the foreground better, enemies have more interesting designs, and the tilesets used for platforms and objects start to shine with creativity. The final two stages of the game, especially, were incredibly captivating. Enemies change parts of their color palette based on the stage you’re in, ensuring that they always fit their surroundings while feeling fresh. Animations for characters, enemies, and objects are incredibly fluid and have a lot of personality behind them. Belle will start to stretch if you leave her idle, and pulling from her history as an acrobat, she spins in the air when jumping and bounces with joy if you pull off a high jump and land without issue.

It replicates and refines the GBA’s style so well that I actually feel like this was ideally made to be seen on smaller displays, both to and against its favor. When playing in windowed mode at a small resolution on my PC, which makes the screen-size roughly twice that of a GBA, the game looked excellent. It was incredibly sharp, details popped into view, and everything had full clarity and didn’t feel bunched together. In fullscreen with a 34” monitor, however, things become a bit less clear. Portraits and fonts that look perfect when smaller start to appear messy and are difficult to parse when stretched out to fullscreen due to the low resolution of the sprites. I wouldn’t consider this a con, per se, more a flaw of the artstyle they are emulating. Nonetheless, I wanted to bring it up for those who may struggle with reading difficult fonts or typefaces.

This emulation of style extends to both the sound effects and music, which are largely made of bitcrushed effects, classic square-wave sounds, and some nostalgic soundfonts. Bitcrushed white noise can be heard in the whooshing of Chime flying by, the puffs enemies release when defeated, and the sliding of Belle against the ground. Classic square-wave sounds common from the NES and Game Boy/GB Color are all over the sound of this game from the music, to Belle’s jumping, Chime bouncing against objects, coins being picked up, and much more. But it isn’t all bits and chirps, as soundfonts usually back up the driving chiptune music with plucky harps, sweeping strings, funky drums, and more. The actual compositions themselves are exceptional multi-layered driving melodies that do an excellent job at keeping you moving and inspired. It’s a great fusion of instruments and chiptune that I’d easily listen to even outside of the game.

Controls are possibly the most essential aspect of a platformer. Some games, like Celeste, live or die on ultra-precise, quick-to-respond controls that require you to make micro-adjustments in the span of a few seconds. Traditional platformers, like the 2D Mario titles, focus more on momentum and ensuring you don’t overcommit to a bad jump. Curse Crackers falls somewhere between the two with a mixed focus of momentum and precision movement. Some puzzles and stages expect you to master movement to keep chain bounces up so as to not fall, while others expect you to make quick adjustments in the air to avoid falling. Platformers are best played with controllers, so I tend to play them as such. Movement is done with the D-Pad or analog sticks, while jumping, throwing Chime, or using items is done with the face buttons, and you can toggle running by holding the analog triggers. Keyboard controls are a bit less refined, with movement done using either the arrow keys or WASD, while the face button controls are replaced by ZXCV, and running done by shift. It’s not a particularly comfortable setup, but fairly standard for platformers, so I can’t fault them for it.

Finally, we arrive at the moral concerns for this title. The game features a ton of lore hidden behind books that you encounter in peoples’ houses or gather from levels, and it paints a tale of conflict between the different races of the world born from the scales and their abilities, some even being discriminated against for their abilities or appearance. There are also multiple characters with partially revealing outfits showing some cleavage, with one very egregious example towards the end of the game I’d best describe as bikini-like. It’s necessary to complete the game, and they fill the whole screen as a giant. Some light language is present in the title, as well as some cartoon violence and depictions of blood. This leaves Curse Crackers in an odd spot where it feels like it wasn’t really designed for anyone in particular. The game can, at times, feel juvenile and like it was made for kids, then suddenly you’re dealing with mature emotional conflict, discrimination, multi-generational conflicts between different races, and skimpily dressed characters.

All in all, Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils is a great platformer with a lot of charm and polish. It has a strong identity in its gameplay, visuals, and sound, but it isn’t revolutionary—the team knew what they could achieve and perfected the game based on that scope. I highly recommend it even at full price, though with only around 5 hours required to beat the game, those who might be a bit tighter on funds should wait for a sale if this interests them.

- Remington