Past Cure Reviews

Mar 05, 2018  Past Cure wants to meld Inception with the styling of Max Payne, The Evil Within, and Heavy Rain. It fails spectacularly. Read why this is a turgid tale.

Advertisement“I won’t mince words: Past Cure is a bad video game.”It’s honestly hard to know where to even begin with the major issues found in Past Cure, but I guess it’s easiest to start with the most dumbfounding part of the experience: its story. Up front, I want to state that coming into Past Cure I was very excited to see the narrative that Phantom 8 Studio had created. The team openly wore its inspirations on its sleeve saying they were trying to model Past Cure as a psychological-thriller in the same vein as films like Inception and Fight Club with an added element of action from something like John Wick. On paper, this made me intrigued.That’s as far as my excitement got though. Moments into Past Cure, it becomes plainly apparent that you have absolutely no idea what is going on. The game’s simple premise follows a single-named protagonist known only as Ian who is hunting down a group of men that held him captive and performed experiments on him for years.

After finally escaping, Ian learns that he has powers — if they can even be called such — that allow him to do nifty things like disable security cameras and solve block puzzles. I’m being facetious but the supposed powers that Ian has play no critical role in the gameplay portion of Past Cure.As his powers he uses begin to cause him to delve into madness, Ian tries desperately to find his former captors and right himself. While this might sound promising, what the real issue with it is the way that the story is told. Past Cure contains a script that is so disorderly and so unwieldy that you’ll ask yourself questions like, “Wait, who is this character?” and, “What the heck are they talking about?” at least a dozen times over the course of the five or so hour playtime.

In fact, the only way I was able to even restate the plot of Past Cure to you was by looking up the description of the game on its website. Large sections in Past Cure will make you think you missed something, but nope, it’s just poor storytelling.Also worth noting in regards to story and characters is that Past Cure contains the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard in my life. Not just in the video game medium, either, but in any digital storytelling medium. The performance for Ian, in particular, is so devoid of emotion that I’m less upset with the voice actor in question for his performance and am instead more bothered that Phantom 8 deemed it worthy enough for the game. For a game that tries to rely so heavily on its story, the simple act of listening to its characters speak becomes a chore.Even further, it doesn’t help when the dialogue in question is so bad that I begin laughing when I shouldn’t. My roommate came into the room while watching me play Past Cure this past weekend and within moments he started cracking up by merely listening to the characters speak. Days later and he’s still making jokes about one section where a character reminisces about the time they received a baseball bat as a gift. So I guess you could say that the dialogue is memorable but not for the right reasons.On the gameplay front, things aren’t much better.

In fact, they’re probably somehow worse. The best way I can describe Past Cure concerning its movement and gunplay would be to have you imagine a third-person action game from fifteen years ago. Now I want you to imagine that same sort of early 2000s third-person game with more imprecise aiming and a character that feels like his knees don’t bend when walking — a note we alluded to in our previous. This image should hopefully help give you a better picture of what its like to play Past Cure. AdvertisementEven writing this, I’m honestly so baffled that Past Cure is somehow worse in terms of controls than games I was playing when I was in grade school. This in conjunction with terrible AI, boring weapons, and as I mentioned earlier, “powers” that literally do nothing other than occasionally slow down time make for a snoozefest of an experience. Past Cure also encourages you to use stealth to your advantage quite a bit, and boy, those play out just about as well as you would expect.

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I have a more significant issue with video games as a whole that throw in unneeded stealth mechanics and Past Cure has joined that list.All of the action sequences that occur take place within some incredibly recycled environments with one parking garage section being specifically egregious. Past Cure is an ugly looking game that also suffers frequently from texture pop-in. Plus, the character design is straight-up–I’m running out of negative descriptive adjectives–abhorrent from main characters like Ian to the slew of soldiers you’ll come across. The finalized character models in Past Cure look like early concept models that’d you’d see in the early days of game development for other titles.A handful of technical issues plagued my already gaudy experience in Past Cure more than it needed to be.

While playing on PS4, the game crashed for me twice, and I saw a handful of graphical errors. Worst of all of these was a glitch that kept me from witnessing the game’s final cutscene. As of now, Phantom 8 has told me they are familiar with this bug, and I hope that it will be fixed upon final release.“The only positive thing I can say about Past Cure is that I’ve taken this hit and played the game for you so that you don’t have to.”Perhaps my biggest issue with Past Cure above everything else I have mentioned is that it feels so uninspired. I’m hard-pressed to believe that Phantom 8 Studio found anything in Past Cure to be what I would consider “fun” because there’s just none to be had. If you were to play this game and tell me that you had a great time with it, I would encourage you to check your pulse because you’re probably dead.

In all seriousness though, I just can’t understand what Phantom 8 was trying to accomplish with this project because it doesn’t feel unique or fleshed out in any way.The only positive thing I can say about Past Cure is that I’ve taken this hit and played the game for you so that you don’t have to. In a time where I believe games are better than ever, I implore you to spend your hard-earned free time cozying up to literally any other game — even Superman 64. Past Cure is not just the worst game I have played over the past few years; it’s now on the shortlist of worst games I’ve ever played in my life.

Past Cure is a third-person psychological thriller game that is developed by Phantom 8 - a new German studio comprised of just eight people. Despite the team’s size, Phantom 8 has been very ambitious from the beginning, with the team aiming to create a game with near-AAA production values. However, this is one of those situations where you shouldn’t have bitten off more than you could chew, as Past Cure is a just a game that had a lot potential but failed to achieve greatness.

Past Cure follows the story of Ian, a former special operations soldier who became victim of experimentation and torture in prison during a mission in Syria. As a result of this, Ian has a three-year gap in his memory and suffers from severe nightmares, but also gained a set of superhuman powers such as time manipulation. With the help of his brother, Ian sets out to find the people who did this to him and make them pay. While it’s an interesting and intriguing premise, i felt a bit disappointed by the overall delivery of the story, as I was left with more questions than answers, something that the game’s somewhat ambiguous ending didn’t help.

Split into seven chapters, Past Cure offers a lot of variety in terms of gameplay. Due to Ian’s fractured and fragile state of mind, you will have chapters that take place in the real world and chapters where you are inside Ian’s terrifying nightmares. The sections in the real world offer a mix of stealth and gunplay gameplay, while the nightmares section is all about horror and puzzle solving. While none of these sections are particularly brilliant, the variety and gameplay genre change between chapters helps the pace of the game and keeps things fresh through this 5 to 7 hours experience, if you appreciate both genres at least.

During the game’s action sequences, Ian’s powers are crucial to survival. Using Ian’s astral projection ability (his spirit leaves the body), you are able to check enemy positions, interact with objects, and disable security cameras, something that becomes very useful to plan your strategy in case you want to deal with the enemies with stealth. Not every section can be completed with just stealth, and in these situations, Ian’s time manipulation is without a doubt your best friend to survive the gunfights. By slowing down time, you can easily headshot everybody in the room, and change position without risk of getting shot to death.

While these gameplay mechanics are interesting, the experience is somewhat ruined by sluggish and unresponsive melee controls, the absence of a decent cover system, among other issues. Ian’s powers are tied to a sanity meter which depletes everytime you use them. However, there’s no real consequence to abusing his powers, as all that you get for depleting the sanity meter is a blurry screen for a second before the meter partially fills itself back up, making this a mechanic you can exploit over and over. There were also a few occasions where I started certain sections with so few bullets that it became mandatory to headshot everyone while not wasting bullets in order to survive the gunfight. The checkpoint system in also very unforgiving, with very few checkpoints and far between each other, something that becomes frustrating when added to the game’s other issues.

During the nightmares sections you will often have to solve puzzles while porcelain men are trying to hunt you down. In most sequences you have your gun with you, which makes these porcelain beings hardly any threat. However, there’s one nightmare later in the game that takes place in a dark prison, making this part an horror sequence that could have been easily taken out of a Silent Hill game. To make things more intense, you don’t you have gun this time around, leaving you with no choice but sneak past the porcelain men unnoticed, and it’s another section where Ian’s powers come really in handy. Overall, I found this to be the best part of Past Cure, not because it’s particularly brilliant, but because it excels in comparison to the rest.

For a game that was made by just eight people, I must say that visually Past Cure is impressive, although it’s not something on the same level as several AAA titles on market. The environments look polished, although they are also bland and empty, with the exception of the horror section. Although I praise the visuals, several other aspects definitely needed some work, such as animations, character models, and framerate issues. While the soundtrack does a passable job, the voice acting is one of the worst I have heard in years. The way the voice actors deliver their lines shows a complete lack of interested and emotion in delivering their lines, so much that even I could probably deliver a large majority of these lines better, and English is not even my native language.

Final Thoughts

Past Cure is a game that had a lot of potential, but with a limited budget and an inexperienced team, it ultimately crumbles under all its ambition and ideas. While there are some interesting gameplay mechanics and lots of variety, these are accompanied by several gameplay issues and lack in polish in several areas. Even if Past Cure isn’t a great game, I have to praise Phantom 8 for the valiant effort and ambition, which leaves me intrigued and somewhat excited to know whatever the studio is working on next.