Hold your torch steady, explorer, lest you lose your soul plundering the temple’s inky depths.
Curse of the Dead Gods releases today on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and all of us at Passtech Games can’t wait for you to see our take on the roguelike dungeon crawler. It is a popular genre – one that we love too – so today we’d like to show you how Curse of the Dead Gods stands out as a unique and thrilling experience unlike any other.
As you delve deeper into the temple, it will tempt you with powerful weapons and relics with useful bonuses. If you don’t have enough gold, the temple will accept your blood as payment. Alas, the more blood you give, the more corrupted you become. Even if you don’t sacrifice blood, each door you pass through at the end of a room will add to your corruption meter. Once full, you’ll get your first curse effect.
There are many curses, most of them significantly impacting how you play and interact with the other gameplay systems, such as traps, or light and darkness. The effects can be deadly but are more often about adapting to new circumstances. For each champion you defeat, you will be cleansed of one curse of your choosing, but if you reach five curses, your life will start to drain until death comes… tick-tock, explorer.
These double-edged swords provide an interesting balancing act that you must constantly be considering. For example, “Dark Fervour” will cause you to passively gain corruption over time but going through a door no longer adds more corruption. “Raging Temple,” another curse, turns previously harmless statues into fire-spitting deathtraps.
Another standout feature of Curse of the Dead Gods is its environmental gameplay. Your torch lights up your immediate surroundings, and you can use it to set braziers and enemies aflame. Besides taking more damage in darkness, you also can’t see traps in it. With spiked floors, flame-belching statues, poison-spitting contraptions, and more, you’ll want to be aware of your surroundings, especially since these can be turned against your enemies.
While Curse of the Dead Gods is certainly a challenging game, we wanted to provide a wide range of interesting and unique options for every run, rather than only increasing your power gradually over time. As you defeat champions and bosses, you’ll gain two types of currency: Crystal Skulls and Jade Rings.
Crystal Skulls’ primary use is to unlock blessings. Each blessing is linked to one of the temple’s Gods of Wonder and grants you a special, divine power to reward you for your previous explorations. “Indomitable” restores half your health after defeating a champion or boss. Pair this with “Gift of Transmutation”, which turns surplus health into gold, for a nifty combo. You can only enable three blessings at a time, so explore your options and choose wisely. You can also use your Crystal Skulls to reveal weapon altars, which expand your selection of starting weapons before you start a run. A weapon can only appear on an altar if it has first been unlocked.
As for the Jade Rings, use them to unlock a range of exotic weapons. Each time you unlock a weapon, it will become possible to find within the Temple.
It’s the combination of these mechanics, their overlap, and the smooth, dynamic and tactical combat at the core of it all, that make Curse of the Dead Gods unique. We hope you’ve enjoyed this taste of what the Temple has to offer. Explore it for real now on Xbox One!
Curse of the Dead Gods
Focus Home Interactive
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