Curse of Anabelle is an adventure horror game from Rocwise Entertainment, delivering us the spine shivers we have been craving since October, sadly, came to a sad close. If you’re like me and miss Halloween-time all year round and love horror movies, you are going to love this game. It features phenomenal graphics, a very intriguing story and atmospheric sound design that had me feeling nervous from the moment the game booted up.
In Curse of Anabelle, you play as Nathan, who is a fantastic boyfriend to a girl named Emily. Emily has recently lost her little sister in a terrible accident and decides to go after her, in an attempt to figure out what caused her baby sister’s untimely death. Nathan, being the fantastic boyfriend that he is, decides to go after his girlfriend after she makes this stupid decision. The mystery centers around this mansion owned by a family called the Ramsey’s, which is rumored to be cursed due to the amount of deaths that have occurred there. This section of the game reminds me of Monster House, which is personally one of my favorite Halloween movies.
At first glance, the story line doesn’t seem very original, but the developers add in a real-world element that really brings a fresh take to this style of adventure game. By adding in real historical myths and legends, the story gets a more historical take to it that a personally really liked. Overall, the story is very interesting, and other than a few story beats that I personally didn’t really like (for example, the police in the very beginning of the game literally just leave a body and a crime scene without doing anything else. I don’t know why but this really seemed silly to me.) I really enjoyed this aspect of the game.
The story is coupled with hyper-realistic graphics that look just stunning. In certain aspects of the game, you can see the little baby hairs on Nathan’s head, and the pores all across Emily’s face. It looks beautiful, and really adds to the immersion and atmosphere that this game does such a good job building. The gameplay is very simple, focused around walking from place to place, finding things, and solving puzzles. What really shines here is just the atmospheric nature of the game through the graphics and the sound design. I love horror movies, but admittedly I am a scardy-cat when it comes to horror games. There is something about being in the driver’s seat that really takes the experience to the next level for me, and this game takes it even a step further. The sound of the rain outside, paired with mostly a lack of music just made me plain nervous. I had to take the headphones off and turn all the lights on, because this was super scary for me! The atmosphere of some places made me just say “nope!” and run right back to where I came from. This really sold me on the premise and honestly got me really spooked, even with all the lights on!
In conclusion, this is a great horror game if you are looking to play around in this genre. The story really delivers, and the graphics alone suck you in from the very beginning. I loved the elements of picking up books and reading them and getting into the lore the story had to offer. It reminded me quite a bit about the games we all played back on Xbox 360, where there were books or tapes that we could listen to, to learn more about the larger world. I had a few performance issues while running this game, such as odd textures jumping through the floor and some frame skipping, and I always feel like I should mention that just on the off chance that it’s a larger issue, but at this point my computer is almost four years old so this is most likely an issue on my end.
I invite you all to have a little spooky season this February and take a dive into Curse of Anabelle. 8/10
Check Out the Curse of Anabelle Steam Launch Trailer:
The Curse of Anabelle releases today for PC via Steam for just $19.99 in the first week and $24.99 thereafter.
Steam Review
I am a senior studying History at the University of Michigan. I've been playing video games since I was very young and around age 16 I had become entirely obsessed with the medium. I hope to one day work in the industry in any way I can.
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