Curse of the Dead Gods

A trap for greed, built into the mechanics

Curse of the Dead Gods puts you in a cursed temple with a weapon, a torch, and a rule the game never lets you forget: everything worth doing raises your curse. Fighting in darkness raises it. Paying blood at shrines for extra power raises it. Rushing through certain rooms rather than clearing them properly raises it. Once the curse meter fills, you get a permanent, powerful debuff — alongside an equally powerful blessing that offsets it, if you're lucky with the draw. It's a push-your-luck system in the tradition of Spelunky's greed mechanics, but woven far more tightly into the isometric, Dead Cells-adjacent combat than most roguelites manage: every fight is also a resource-management decision about exactly how much risk this room is worth.

Developer Passtech Games, based in Lyon, put the idea through a genuinely productive Early Access period. The game entered Steam Early Access in March 2020 with a single temple — the Jaguar section — available, and expanded across the following year with community-driven tweaks before leaving Early Access on 23 February 2021 with a simultaneous release across PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. That's the trap this review's lane exists to catch: the visible Steam release date reads 2021, but the game's actual public debut, and the year its identity and mechanics were established, was 2020.

What critics and most players liked

The reception at launch was strong, not just decent. Metacritic settled at 79 for the PC version (78 on PS4 and Switch, 90 on Xbox One), and IGN's 9/10 review called it a "standout roguelite" — high praise in a genre that, by 2021, already had Hades, Dead Cells and Slay the Spire setting the bar. Steam's lifetime user score has held at Very Positive since, 82.7% of 4,371 reviews as of this writing. Passtech kept working after the full release too: an April 2021 free update, "Curse of the Dead Cells," added weapons crossed over from Motion Twin's Dead Cells at no cost — the kind of goodwill gesture that tends to show up in a review corpus as gratitude rather than grumbling, and it does here.

The praise clusters consistently around the curse system itself and the combat's weight — parries, dodges and stamina management that reward patience over button-mashing — and around the game's relatively unusual dark, oppressive tone for the genre, built from Mesoamerican-inspired temple architecture and monster design rather than the more common pixel-art or cartoon aesthetics of its roguelite peers.

Where the 17% land, and why it's worth taking seriously

Curse of the Dead Gods isn't a divisive game in the way some titles in this lane are — a four-fifths-plus Very Positive score is a real consensus — but the minority opinion is unusually coherent rather than scattered, which is itself worth noting. Two complaints dominate the negative sample almost to the exclusion of anything else.

The first is difficulty. "In the final stretches of hard mode, the game becomes so punishingly insane that you have to want to hurt yourself to play this," reads one review from a player with nearly 100 hours logged — someone who clearly liked the game enough to invest heavily before souring on it. Valve's own achievement data gives that complaint hard numbers rather than leaving it as review-corpus vibes: 84.9% of players who've unlocked at least one achievement have completed the tutorial, but the curve collapses fast after that — 58.8%, 47.4% and 45.2% for each temple's first champion, down to just 17.0%, 13.5% and 12.2% for each temple's actual boss, and a mere 7.3% for the endgame Death Champion. Fewer than one in thirteen engaged players ever beats the game.

The second, raised almost as often, is the comparison to Hades — inevitable for anything in this genre released either side of Supergiant's 2020 breakout, but specific here rather than lazy. Reviewers don't fault Curse of the Dead Gods for lacking Hades' dialogue-driven narrative so much as for lacking any equivalent structure: no hub to return to, no characters whose relationships deepen across runs, nothing to soften a loss beyond the raw currency you banked. "That game had an overarching plot and a home base you could come back to... talk to people, pet the dog," reads one review with over 1,300 hours logged; "something [here] is missing." A related, recurring gripe about currency scaling — upgrade costs rising faster than a typical run earns them — reads as the mechanical symptom of the same structural gap: without a narrative reason to keep grinding, a slow currency curve reads as padding rather than pacing.

Reading the negative sample by year shows this isn't purely a launch phenomenon: 36 land in 2021 (the full-release year), but a second, comparably sized wave — 28 — lands in 2023, two years after launch, likely reflecting a fresh audience discovering the game via a sale or bundle and comparing it against a roguelite landscape that had, by then, fully absorbed Hades' influence. The complaints in that later wave are almost identical to the 2021 ones, difficulty and thin meta-progression, which suggests the game simply asks something different of players than the genre's current standard-bearer does, rather than having gotten meaningfully harder or worse with age.

Verdict

Curse of the Dead Gods is a well-made, well-reviewed roguelite with one genuinely distinctive mechanic — the curse meter — built by a developer that used its Early Access year properly and kept supporting the game afterward with free content rather than DLC. It is not, and was never trying to be, Hades; judged as the tighter, meaner, more mechanically demanding dungeon-crawler it actually is, both critics and the large majority of its 4,371 Steam reviewers rate it well. The clustered minority complaint — real difficulty spikes with no narrative cushioning to soften them — is worth taking at face value rather than dismissing, especially since Valve's own numbers confirm it: most players who start this game do not finish it.

Wanderer's own systems are built around the opposite instinct — steady, forgiving progression that keeps paying out even on a bad session — so it's worth saying plainly that Curse of the Dead Gods' appeal is exactly the audience that wants the alternative: real stakes, a real chance of walking away with nothing, and a curse meter that never lets you forget it.