Cursed Shorts Review (PC)

As if doom scrolling wasn’t depressing enough. Here, the Cursed Shorts are there to reflect our feelings of shame and our natural desire to procrastinate. Like a bottomless social feed with one too many reels, it keeps us hooked on the simple things—the mindless act of swiping through videos whilst searching for something to help invoke an emotion. The only thing that sets this application apart from its prolific kin is its content; the cutesy cat videos are null and void, but the strange anomalies and intense nature of the clips are commonplace. And it’s your job, as a doomed overseer of said feed, to keep scrolling, not to scratch an itch or inflate an ego, but to prevent a train from derailing and winding up in an almighty purgatory.

True to its word, Cursed Shorts provides a short narrative-driven experience—an experience that, like a good batch of compelling reels, invites you to scroll through the clips and, with the power of intuition, decipher the content from the clips in question. If it’s a regular video that doesn’t pose much of a threat, then you can simply swipe up to the next clip, but if it’s an unusual, somewhat disturbing montage of peculiar events, then you must swipe left. And that’s essentially all that you’re doing here: doom scrolling through a collection of videos whilst sitting aboard a train without a destination, and figuring out whether or not to enact the whistleblower policy, or simply ignore the (hopefully) ordinary footage in the hopes that it isn’t idling in receipt of some form of hidden secret.

If you’ve played through an anomaly game before, then you should know how this works. And if you haven’t, then don’t sweat it — we’ll doom scroll as a team.

Doom Scrolling For Change

Cursed Shorts puts you aboard a short journey—a ride that takes roughly thirty to forty-five minutes to beat—where a regular train is destined to arrive at its scheduled platform. On this train, you find yourself worryingly bombarded with ominous footage and an entire tapestry of video clips—materials that have no real relevance or connection with the other clips in the series. With that, you begin to swipe through them — like a checklist, with which you would naturally eliminate boxes until all but one remains. Here, though, you have a choice—a make-or-break decision that will either keep the train barreling towards its next destination, or halting it from ever reaching the platform. No pressure there, then.

The game itself plays out in a similar fashion as a lot of spot-the-anomaly games, with the clips containing abnormal intricacies or harrowing details for you to find. If a clip looks ordinary, then you can choose to swipe up, at which point the train will usher into a new direction. But if you find something unusual, then you can swipe left, after which you will have the opportunity to analyze the footage and decide whether or not it will keep you on the right track, so to speak. And that’s essentially all that Cursed Shorts is: an interactive hidden object game that leans into social media and the miserable reality of doom scrolling.

The Little Things

While I wouldn’t say that the footage itself is bursting with naturally terrifying things, I can say that it does foster some disturbing imagery—the type that makes the eye wander and the user think twice about the context. For instance, one clip depicts several students holding each other’s arms, while an extra, more pale and somewhat ghostly arm appears to indicate that there is another student or, in this case, an unnatural case of paranormal behavior stalking the composition. And there are plenty of those moments stitched into the narrative, too, which is great. It isn’t bone-chillingly eerie, but it is enough to raise a few hairs on the back of your neck, as any decent horror game should.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a storyline to poke holes in here. Aside from the fact that there is a train, a passenger, and a spool of video clips to navigate, Cursed Shorts isn’t in possession of anything majorly noteworthy. The only saving grace here, however, is that it offers a couple of alternate endings for you to unlock — which is always a welcome surprise.

Mechanic-wise, Cursed Shorts doesn’t contain any particularly bad fixtures, excluding, perhaps, the fault that often forces certain clips to be auto-assigned to either of the two options without any input. It isn’t a stupidly poor thing, though it does sully an otherwise short and seamless transition between clips and, eventually, the grand conclusion that rounds off the entire experience. A small thing — but a thing, no less.

With all of the above said, Cursed Shorts is an easy game to jump into, more so given that it extends a helping hand by way of allowing you the opportunity to pause and critique footage whilst you wheedle through the backlogs and archives. Unnecessary, but useful.

Verdict

Cursed Shorts captures a good amount of detail in its wide variety of media clips and unnerving stories, with its disturbing ambiance and perpetual loop of a nightmarish origin providing a solid foundation for a genuinely interesting anomaly IP. While the storyline itself is disappointingly short and devoid of any twists or turns, it does congregate around a tailorable ending that makes the journey all the more exciting. And that’s a small thing, for sure, but it definitely helps to broaden the overall picture, nonetheless.

Of course, if you happen to enjoy analyzing side-by-side images or, more specifically, the “WHEN YOU SEE IT” threads on just about any modern social media platform, then you’ll probably enjoy scrolling through the sizable webbing of ominous clips and found footage segments that populate this particular application. Again, it’s a short experience, so don’t expect to scrape any more out of it than a brief thirty-minute scrolling affair. If you can stomach the lack of content, though, then you shouldn’t find the act of mindlessly swiping through these images dauntingly difficult.