Quintus and the Formidable Curse review for PC

I knew that I was in for a bad time with Quintus and the Formidable Curse even before I started playing it. I went into the settings, changed the input from mouse and keyboard to controller, and then…immediately had nothing happen when the game started. Settings again, change input again, and nothing happened again. After a third try, I was finally able to get my character moving.

Unfortunately, my experience didn’t get much better after that. I soon discovered that the game froze every time I opened a door, and only unfroze after I paused it and – you guessed it – checked the settings again. Given that the first chapter of the game takes place in a house where you have to open a few doors, you can see how that would be annoying.

Mind you, that cycle of “open door-pause-restart-regain the ability to move again” was infinitely better than the times the controls randomly stopped working entirely, and required me to restart the game. I’d like to say that those moments were few and far between, but the mere fact that it happened at all is pretty shameful.

Also shameful: the baffling, possibly non-existent save system. I persevered through Quintus and the Formidable Curse’s first chapter, quit the game, and then came back and discovered none of my progress had been saved. I also double-checked and confirmed that there was no way to manually save your progress either, which makes me wonder: how are you supposed to get anywhere in the game?

Then again, maybe you’re not meant to get anywhere in Quintus and the Formidable Curse. The game was released in a broken state and is almost unplayable, so you’d have to be a glutton for punishment to bother with it – and if you’re in the mood to punish yourself, why not play a game where you constantly play the broken first level over and over and over?

For everyone else, though, just don’t even bother. Quintus and the Formidable Curse’s one saving grace is that it an odd, off-kilter color scheme that gives the game some eerie vibes — always a good thing in a horror game — but ultimately, those aren’t enough to distract from the fact that the scariest thing about this game is that it was released in this state.

Wreck Tangle Games provided us with a Quintus and the Formidable Curse PC code for review purposes.