Cursed 1 is a neat, short experience. It's the first entry in an incredibly good trilogy, but we're not judging it based on future games.
As a standalone game, it's fine. The game is a very basic point and click adventure game with some light action combat and survival horror elements sprinkled in. Your goal is to solve a few specific puzzles and try to rescue a girl who has been lost in the mines. Most of the puzzles boil down to needing a specific item from a specific area to do something in particular; there's no inventory juggling, other than a few temporary use spell scrolls.
While you do this, you will occasionally be accosted by endlessly spawning monsters, which force you into a small 1v1 combat. Again, very basic. You can attack, and shield. There's a large amount of mostly intentional lag when attacking and defending, so getting "good" at the combat mostly boils down to being patient and learning to play proactively; mashing the attack button will leave you incredibly exposed. Since healing is limited (there's only a few water pools and healing scrolls in the entire game, none of which respawn), there's an aspect of resource management, but it's entirely feasible to perfect the final boss. So you're not likely to get fully soft locked. It does drive some fun tension, however.
With that said, the game's default controls kind of suck for combat; you either click small icons in the bottom of the screen for attack and defense, or you use the CTRL and ALT keys as a quick option. You can get by pretty easily with just clicking the icons for most fights, but one action segment later in the game demands you both click on projectiles AND time a shield block. This one is basically impossible to do without a lot of health or using the hot key controls.
The game is also fairly buggy; it was made in a week, and it shows. Events and text boxes can quickly overlap on each other if you click too fast, enemy encounters can stop instant death situations from occurring. It never locked up or crashed though, which is nice. It's mostly just very janky rather than outright broken.
Speaking of instant deaths, the game has quite a few of them. Mostly just "if you did not solve this puzzle, you die" type of things, though one or two are ones you really could not reasonably see coming. With how easy it is to save, though, it's not much of a problem. The save system could benefit from actually displaying what's saved in a given save slot (there's 3) before you hit the save button, but that's not super hard to mentally track with how short the run time is.
So yeah, it's pretty janky and simple, because it was made in a week. Might turn you off, but it's a short enough game that's free. So definetly give it a shot. There is some genuinely clever game design underneath it all; you're given a teleport scroll right after solving a maze puzzle, meaning that you never actually have to do the puzzle a second time, as teleporting lets you skip it, and return to the room where the scroll spawns. Most areas have some shortcut or another to cut down on general back tracking and prevent you from having to go through something horrible more than once, which is nice and appreciated. The jank of the combat aside, there's also some fun fights here and there, especially near the end.
So, yeah. Janky, short game with a surprising amount of heart and some clever decisions now and again. It's no masterpiece, but it's better than it looks and is worth giving a shot. Because again, it's free. Why not?
