Indie Game of the Week 453: Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils

This week sees a return of Colorgrave to IGotW, they of the pretty OK Link's Awakening homage Prodigal. Possibly because of its sweet pun name, it feels like they got a bit more press and acclaim alike with the mostly unrelated follow-up Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils, which like Prodigal delves into the largely untouched vein of Indie nostalgia for the figurative tiny office building between skyscrapers that is the Nintendo Game Boy Color. I'll admit, I've only played a handful of the games that came out on GBC—as opposed to the tough acts to follow/precede it, the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance—so my affection for it isn't as pronounced but I do appreciate any effort to corner an underappreciated aesthetic while near everyone else in the space is busy making their own idealized SNES and PS1 never-weres. It also helps that Curse Crackers is a fantastic platformer that is head and shoulders above most of the genre fare that actually released on Nintendo's little chromatic hero.

The eponymous toiling Belle is a former circus acrobat whose date with the nondescript Clyde is interrupted by her erstwhile bestie Bonnie after she abducts him—a gender subversion on the usual kidnapping trope—and Belle is prompted to chase after her rival alongside her other close companion, a creature named Chime that resembles one of those small round bells you put on cats. As an acrobatic type, Belle's capable of a few tricks suited for a platforming heroine including a taller jump (after ducking first, in SMB2 style) and a front flip that greatly increases her horizontal jumping length; however, her more useful skills require working in tandem with Chime, throwing him around and leapfrogging off of him while in mid-air for an effective double-jump. The game carries a lot of forward motion due to these acrobatics, if not quite to a Sonic degree, and its handful of out-the-way puzzles often revolve around the throwing mechanic.

The mystery of these Oath Blades and their colossal patron, found in each level, is but one of many mysteries the game encourages you to uncover.

Saying that, the game offers a bit more depth than the standard stage-based platformer conceit, with an overworld featuring inconspicuous secret areas (like Zelda II), towns with NPCs where you can gather information or pick up side-missions or buy power-ups, a whole tail after the credits roll with tough hidden stages and other Fez-like mysteries to decipher, and an arcade mode that challenges you to beat the whole game with limited lives and as many score-multiplying "curses" that you think you can manage. It's also pretty rich with lore, unusual for both its genre and for the console it's riffing on, with a whole mythology about seven demigod "scales" of the world's draconic creator god, all of whom vanished a long time ago after a war with a rebellious sister of theirs but only after creating their own mortal races with characteristics shared by their divine progenitor (it all reminded me a bit of the obscure Birthright D&D setting, oddly enough). Feels like overkill for a GBC mascot platformer with a cute bell companion but I always admire devs that go a tad extra with their worldbuilding.

I think if I'd played more GB/GBC games back in its heyday I would've picked up on more of this game's influences. There's certainly comparisons to be made to Link's Awakening and its mechanical progenitor—and the game's quasi-namesake—The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls (which, in turn, is riffing on a John Donne poem) considering the overworld and level of secrets to find. Something about Belle's physicality recalls the 1994 Donkey Kong Game Boy port (though "port" is an understatement) with Mario's flips and other tricks and as stated prior there's something about the game's subversive, irreverent humor and art style that strongly evokes the Wario Land games. Character sprites are chunky and animated well, though you occasionally run into that issue a lot of early portable games did where these sprites take up so much of the screen that it's often hard to react in time to projectiles or enemies that suddenly appear from the edges. There's also some mostly optional bragging rights by way of medals you can earn post-level, including time trials which I'm typically not a fan of in platformers but works well enough with the aforementioned sense of speed here. There's five main worlds with five levels apiece but even so it doesn't feel all that small in any way; levels are lengthy enough to require multiple checkpoints and tough enough that it has a Shovel Knight-style corpse run mechanic to recover cash lost upon dying.

Most boss fights are perhaps a bit more standard than this guitar duel with a giant punk skeleton but there's a strain of the unconventional throughout.

Another star here is the presentation, with an excellent soundtrack from multiple composers (I struggled digging up exactly who did what) buoying the already decent visual direction and clean animations that would've made this among the prettiest games on GBC had it debuted on there instead. Unlike Prodigal, which I had my issues with, I found Curse Crackers to be a much more appealing throwback that ably exhibited the developers' predilection for lore dumps and GBC callbacks in a more immediately satisfying platformer format that gave you plenty of options between Belle's starting moveset and a set of Shovel Knight/Super Mario Bros. Wonder "artifacts" that were nothing short of game-changing in their special abilities, like adding a double-jump or a charge that effectively made you invincible from the front (there's that Wario comparison again). That there's so much to discover outside the already great platforming core as you traverse the overworld or the local town of Grevenfel is the cherry in top. I might still find the GBC aesthetic limiting in some ways and there's some real hinky hitbox business on occasion but it's not enough to mar one of the better "traditional" (at least in the sense that we're in not in Soulslike/exploraction territory, but classic-ass linear stages) 2D platformers I've checked out of late.

[Speaking of tradition, or at least one I'm going to put more of an effort to make happen for IGotW, I've recorded a brief gameplay demo of this game in action since words aren't always enough. I'm chasing after one of the speedrun medals here, in spite my antipathy for the whole "gotta go fast" thing.]

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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