First Impressions: Cursed Dungeon Raider - Alpha (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Cursed Dungeon Raider through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Cursed Dungeon Raider (Alpha)
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, mac OS, Linux
Release Date: 2026
Publisher: Hoi 4 ED
Developer: Clever AI
Time Spent: 3 Hours, 42 Minutes*
First Play Playlist on YouTube

I think I've come around to Cursed Dungeon Raider.  At first, after trying to play for almost three hours, I wasn't sure what it was I was supposed to be doing.  I would spawn in the same room with a robot-looking place-holder of a butler who outlined your first objective: Get to the local museum and talk to the administrator, who would then direct you to where you would go next.  The spawning room is only a small part of a massive mansion that feels needlessly massive.  My first time playing, I spent nearly 30 minutes wandering around cursing the game at not just starting me at the museum instead of this empty house inhabited by only myself and this motionless butler who apparently keeps more than half a dozen equally massive hearths burning at a full conflagration.  After a while, I understood that I was supposed to go to a museum, but for the life of me, I didn't realize that I was supposed to leave through a nondescript door in a darkened hallway.

It wasn't until after I had been killed (more on that later) that I understood that the mansion functioned more as a hub world than an actual functioning house.  It's a place to show off all of the treasures you find while out on your expeditions.  What was particularly funny about this was that it was only after I was killed and dropped everything that I had found up until that point, gear included.  Cursed Dungeon Raider is also a multiplayer game, although that multiplayer functionality isn't enabled yet in this alpha release of the game, so there really isn't a purpose to show off anything to anyone aside from the person sitting next to you, currently reading over your shoulder. Hello.  Presumably, the massiveness of the museum is another function of your treasure hunting expeditions and will function as another trophy case to show off when you're playing with other players.

Only after I found out how to leave the mansion and where the museum director was located, annoyingly hiding behind the front desk, was I finally somewhat able to go out on my first expedition.  But even that took some time to find the museum director, as I first spent a good 10-15 minutes walking around, admiring the views, comparing it to the Natural History Museum in London, and did I mention trying to locate the administrative offices so that I could talk to the museum director?  The other interesting thing about the two opening areas is that they are only populated by robotic-looking characters that, based on the opening disclaimer, are just placeholders for when assets are updated.  The thing, though, is that I had already created an in-game explanation for why everyone appears to be a robot, and I'm going to quickly share that with you now.

After speaking with the museum director, you're given a new location on your map that's accessible upon leaving the museum.  What I found out on a subsequent run was that you need to absolutely make sure that you are equipped with gear before leaving.  The game passively holds your hand in this regard in that "stocking up on equipment" is an optional task and the director mentions where the storeroom is, but if you're moving too quickly and eager to get your expedition underway, you can end up at the entrance to a dungeon without a ladder, any chalk, a compass, any torches, or even a lighter.  That being said, during my first excursion, I really only used the flashlight until I figured out how to equip the torch, and then I used that until I found a lantern, and then I used that until I was killed.  I understood the purpose of the chalk, to mark where you are in the ruins so as to not get lost, but I had planned on following the doors on my way out, but again, I was killed.

The arrival on the Nordic Island and the subsequent exploration, and following the wooden signposts all felt really good.  I later found out that the entire island is explorable and that there were features that were not along the trail from the boat to the intended ruins.  The second visit to the island, the one where I forgot to load up on equipment, actually turned me around from my initial negative feelings about the game that stemmed from being killed when I was on my way out of the ruins.  But the island itself felt really good in a way that's hard to explain if you don't like combatless walking sims.  It felt like that.

And then there was the exploration of the ruins.

If you watch my video up on YouTube, you're going to think that I couldn't see for most of the time I was underground, and you're only partly correct.  I could not see very well, and that was initially due to not having the torch out because I couldn't figure out how to equip it and was relying on the flashlight, which doesn't give off as much light as you'd expect it to.  The other issue is that the Steam Deck has an issue with compressing recorded videos to look a lot darker than they actually are.  At 12:26 in my Part 2 video, you can hear me pause and bring up the screen brightness settings, cranking them all the way up to 100 with practically no change in the video, but I promise you that it helped a bit from my perspective.  I was also playing in a darkened room, so that helped quite a bit, but the dungeon itself was just really dark to begin with, and for the most part, I was okay with that.  The torches I lit only gave off so much light within a small area.

The tricky part about navigating the dungeon was that there were floor traps laid throughout the entire complex, which I knew about because of the optional quest, "Defuse as many traps as possible."  I was honestly expecting something similar to Skyrim, where tripwires would be visible if you were looking, or one obviously discolored stone amongst a grouping of cobbles.  What I was not expecting, and therefore probably should have expected, were groupings of stones, and the only indication that there was a floor trap was if the text "Defuse" came up on your reticle when you passed over a stone that was trapped.  I had also hoped that the damage from traps was a little more forgiving than taking rougly 60% damage from the two traps that I accidentally triggered.  Combined with the exceedingly low light meant that I spent a good portion of my exploration looking down at the ground any time there were stones about.  Since there didn't seem to be an experience system, I wasn't entirely sure about the wording "...as many traps as possible," unless, in the full release of the game, there will be achievements for disarming a percentage or all of the traps in each location.

The objective for the dungeon, and presumably every other dungeon after, is to plunder it for the riches it holds.  The majority of the items I found were conveniently located in closed chests, although most were just a smattering of coins, possibly hinting that these were just by-the-wayside forgotten leftovers.  I did find a couple of treasures on the ground, and all of the extra and upgraded pieces of equipment I found were outside of chests, which was a nice touch.  Thankfully, the "Main Artifact" was located in a tomb, so it felt more important than being placed inside an identical chest I had already looted five minutes earlier in another room.

Now, I'm sure that the museum director would have been exceedingly pleased with all of the coins, plates, and the Bronze Tortoise Brooch I had found, except he'll never know because I was killed.  Not by a trap, mind you, but by some rock-golem-type monstrosity that came out of the darkness to one-shot no-scope me while I was in the process of making my escape.  I know that the director had warned about other dangers in the dungeon, but everything up to being killed had led me to believe that there weren't going to be any traditional monsters.  And maybe had I full health and/or not fallen prey to two traps, leaving me with about 30% health, I might have survived a single hit.  But hit I was, and died I did.  I was pretty annoyed and respawning back in the mansion, with everything I had collected gone.  I really didn't want to trudge back out to the island to go back to the dungeon to only hope that recovering your loot at the site of your death was a mechanic that existed in this game.

So instead, I did what any self-respecting, recently resurrected archeologist would have done.  I turned the game off. 

When I came back, I decided to revisit the island and was surprised to find that the time of day had cycled from day to dusk.  It was then that I remembered that I didn't have any of the gear I thought I had, and rather than try and brave the dungeon again with only the weak flashlight, I decided to explore the island instead.  Walking over the island, I had time to think about the game, and my feelings changed from one of frustration and having died from what felt like a cheap shot after nearly completing my first run to being "okay" with the game.  Something about being on a deserted snowy island with only the rustling trees and the snow crunching under my feet gave me time to think about what I wanted from this game.

I wanted a semi-low-key exploration game that wasn't going to ask me to kill hordes of undead guardians.  I wasn't looking for complex lock-picking mechanics.  I wasn't looking to fight anything that could be described as a bullet sponge.  Cursed Dungeon Raider really delivered a lot of what I wanted in terms of delving into a dungeon on my own with only ambient in-world sounds, and by the second tripped trap, I knew what to look for.  I also now knew that after finding the "Main Artifact," I would need to book it out of there and likely just escape the dungeon before I could be caught.  I can live with that type of game.

And maybe when I head back to the island, I'll have a slightly better outlook.  After all, the game is still in alpha, so there's plenty of time to fix pacing and any other mechanics that need tweaking.  And maybe make the lights just a little bit brighter.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Wanna Tell The World About It

*Despite the relative shortness of my playthrough videos, I did manage to spend over three hours playing.  A lot of that time was spent in the mansion and museum, as the game would frequently crash whenever I travelled.  Sometimes the game would crash trying to go to the museum, and other times when trying to travel to the Nordic Island.  Or, the game would crash right after arriving on the island.  And then there was at least one update, and I had to create a new save file, but that wasn't too bad, as I had only just figured out where the museum director was located.  I was also afraid that the game was going to make me start a new game every time I tried to play.