BOTHERER ARCHIVE
the writings of a mind

Title: Curse - The Eye Of Isis
Genre: Adventure
Strap: Shite of the living dead

I want you to understand that this is a very bad game. It’s a foreboding beginning, to learn you’re about to review a survival horror from the makers of /Play With the Teletubbies/ and the PS1’s /Sabrina the Teenage Witch/. It’s a more distressing ending to realise that there’s no choice but to start writing the review, as the game has fallen apart into so many pieces that it’s rendered itself unplayable.

I was at the point where I was fighting a zombie bear. It seemed to be taking a quite remarkable number of bullets, and the flame-thrower didn’t appear to be bothering it in the slightest. So I wondered if maybe I wasn’t supposed to kill it with my regular weapons, and recalled that the action that revived the beast was pushing a cabinet aside to reveal a secret door. Using the handle in my inventory, I opened it, and slipped inside. I could still hear the bear growling angrily outside as I looked around the corner, to discover a locked gate. A dead end. So with nowhere else to go, I reluctantly returned to the previous room... To find the bear with its head stuck in the corner of the wall. It continued in its angry gamble, but now on the spot, apparently wedged into the structure of the building. And then fell out of the game.

So that’s pretty much where I’m at. I can’t leave the room, because the other door locked when the bear attacked, and I can’t kill the thing, since it’s now probably somewhere in Renderware Limbo. And as you are only able to save in the random location some fat bloke chooses to hang around, and as that was miles back, there is very low enthusiasm to repeat the bug-ridden miniature railway of misery between his and my current locations.

It’s all thanks to an Egyptian curse, unleashed when some no-good robber type tried to steal the Eye of Isis from its display case in a labyrinthine museum. This curse, in the form of a big yellow cloud looking like a cartoon fart, reanimates the dead, turning them into appallingly programmed zombies, hell-bent on your tedium.

This is the absolute pits of shoddy design, with sprawling identical corridors and an entirely useless map, hideous weapons, and possibly the most ridiculously obfuscating camera I’ve ever encountered. Pointlessly violent, stupidly built, and exclusively without merit.

Score: 10%

Tech Specs:

Publisher: Wanadoo
Developer: Asylum
Price: £25