Betrayer: Curse of the Spine is a 2D Metroidvania with mechanics focusing on a soft RPG system, including leveling and crafting. These core concepts come together well in the 10 hours during my preview period for the game, with each of them playing into the other smoothly as the player explored the sprawling and maze-like maps of the world. Players will collect resources such as herbs and find upgrade points called Ethereal Orbs which are found in chests in the dark corners of forests, caves, and castles. These kinds of games can be difficult, especially when trying to learn the map layout. There are secret entrances and shortcuts to discover, or puzzles to solve laid around the map. Acquiring resources scattered around will go towards providing upgrades.
Betrayer: Curse of the Spine adds layers of difficulty when battling monsters by forcing the player to use their whole bag of tricks to defeat their enemy. The difficulty of the game may be described as Souls-like, but its difficulty does more than be punishing to the player. So, while the preview is dark and difficult it isn’t Dark Souls and many characteristics of that series are not present here.
Instead, the best way to describe the difficulty is that it is challenging because the player is a stranger in a strange land, with no knowledge of the dangerous world around them and thus unaware of how to deal with these unknown threats. That is what makes this game exciting to preview, at least to me. The difficulty of Betrayer: Curse of the Spine is not used to simply torment the player or to show off that they vanquished a ferocious beast. Instead, it’s used to teach the mechanics and to give the player a great sense of accomplishment for not simply memorizing boss patterns. Players will use their creativity to defeat a difficult enemy in combination with adapting to bosses and their attacks to deal with any curve balls thrown.
Welcome to the Spine of the Cursed
Betrayer: Curse of the Spine is set in the fantasy world of Ar’Rho where the Spine of the Cursed sits upon the lost city of Goldrend. We begin at the Spine of the Cursed with our main character waking from thousands of years of slumber. The player controls an entity known as the Betrayer, a figure from another world who broke a pact with the former gods of Ar’Rho. When they retaliated and summoned all their power to remove the Betrayer, it only chained him in the Spine of the Cursed. This massive amount of power used then killed the gods that confined the Betrayer, leaving the world in a strange limbo. Now, the Betrayer has awoken and must find the lost Ethereal Essence atop the Peak of the Chained.
The world of Betrayer: Curse of the Spine leans into the fantasy setting with plenty of fantastical creatures being added such as ogres, kobalts, and dragons but it also introduces plenty of new creatures and monsters that fit the setting and world nicely. This also plays into the gameplay as the Betrayer has plenty of fantasy tools to use such as spells, swords, and bows.
All of this information was gleaned not from cutscenes or characters but instead in several books found around the map. These books go into detail about the world in which Betrayer: Curse of the Spine is set in and tells stories about several different characters that have a profound impact upon the world. For example, bosses and other creatures can have whole books dedicated to their story and lore such as the satyr creatures found near the castle. This gives the setting a sense of time and depth as the player reads stories of old heroes and finds their weapons and keepsakes around the map. The Betrayer didn’t talk and characters that do are few and far between from what I played, thus it was up to me to find and discover the story of the world in which they are exploring through these different pieces of information found in books, item descriptions, and trinkets.
This way of storytelling is very similar to Dark Souls but acquiring knowledge about the world is not nearly as difficult. Many books are self-contained and often focus on a specific topic or event and there are only 30 books in total in the preview. There are also only 30 different kinds of trinkets in the preview as well. In the 10 hours I played, I was able to collect 23 of the books in total and was able to pick up 15 different kinds of trinkets. This makes the storytelling easier to get into and the player will be more willing to try and understand the world and its history rather than simply ignore it. The game also features multiple endings based upon what you can uncover about the story, but I was not able to go far enough into the preview to see this feature.
Ancient Swords, Spikey Bows, and Destructive Spells
There are many attacks at the disposal of the player in the preview but the most basic attacks are sword strikes and shooting arrows. Sword swings are short and can be modified to have the player swing up or down in specific movements. This makes enemies more dangerous to fight hand-to-hand as many games enable the player to create space between an enemy, leaving room to attack or dodge away safely. Betrayer: Curse of the Spine does have movement abilities but they are meant more for exploration than combat due to their longer cooldowns. Players will not be able to roll to freedom like in Ocarina of Time or Dark Souls.
Attacking enemies with a sword is dangerous as they will gladly get struck with the sword only to turn around and smack back immediately. In a more direct way, the game’s enemies don’t respect you the way enemies usually do. They are not going to provide a designated time to strike and won’t act stunned when attacked. Enemies feel like actual challenges in this game. 10 hours into the preview, the small enemies that can be insta-killed in the overworld still put fear into me when they swarmed the screen from both sides. The basic sword strike will be the player’s bread and butter. After upgrading abilities, finding new swords, and better understanding the mechanics (Pro tip: down-striking in the air is infinitely useful for large groups), the sword becomes much more powerful with abilities such as gaining crit-chance, life steal, or even having a chance to inflict fear after an attack.
The bow and arrow will be your second go-to choice and, just like the sword, will come with its own batch of upgrades and different bows. But the bow serves the most important purpose: killing all the flying stuff. While the sword is a powerful weapon, you are not going to be killing many birds by chucking a samurai sword into the air. Like I said earlier, enemies don’t respect you. In other games, flying enemies will gladly fly down and turn their head and whisper, “Now. Hit me now.” The flying enemies in this preview do no such thing.
Giant hornets and bats will make a sound and zip right at players as they are fighting the tree-like Rakoros. The Defiler will make a sound then gladly shoot magic missiles and won’t give you the good graces of flying within striking distance. The bow fills the gap, allowing the player to deal with these threats, not without some adjustment though. Because arrows are not bullets, they fall in the air, making the player adjust based on distance rather than spamming shots, though I wouldn’t recommend that in the first place.
Arrows are not infinite, instead being created by the player using the crafting system and not all enemies drop planks, stone, and feathers all the time. Arrows were precious in the preview and once I found the shopkeeper that sold planks, I acted like I was at Home Depot grabbing as many 2-by-4s as I could purchase with all the gold that popped out of the monsters and chests. Arrows do indeed run out and once they do, you can either become a parkour pro and jump around walls and perform perfect double jumps to strike at an annoying hornet once, or you can just cast a spell.
Spells are found throughout the map, simply by being discovered or as rewards from defeating bosses or unlocking a door. The preview for Betrayer: Curse of the Spine features a wide variety of spells ranging from a simple heal, to an ice storm that surrounds the player, to turning into a werewolf so you can haymaker the dragon that has been yelling in your ear. There is no mana in this game, meaning using spells feels less like magic casting and more like a third attack or ability. This is enforced because spells are upgraded using the same resources as your bow or your sword: Ethereal Orbs.
This means that upgrading these three forms of attack makes the player think which combat style would assist them more, forcing them to play a balancing act. Fireballs shot from totems, summoning massive ghostly bombs, or raising the dead makes attack strategies much more complex and makes the player create their own style of entry. For example, the snow storm ability casts a storm around you but doesn’t extend very far. If a player wished to use this ability a lot, then upgrading the sword would be the player’s best route so that they can deal damage with the storm by getting up close, but having a strong enough sword so the player can get out of sticky situations.
I enjoyed using similar close-ranged spells like the werewolf spell, which turns the Betrayer into a werewolf increasing damage and hearts but limiting movement, Corporeal Worlds, which summons two small red worlds close to you that when touched deal massive damage, and Nature’s Touch, a simple heal that helped me survive large groups. I was focused on getting up close and personal but that came with a catch. Anytime a Defiler would show up in the preview, the game would demonstrate the weakness of my build as my puny bow couldn’t damage the flying enemy well enough. That is the balancing act at work. These three different kinds of abilities give combat in this so much freedom and breadth. I could see people playing this game on release and after beating it, start another playthrough with a completely different style and completely unique ways of dealing with enemies the second time around, making replayability much more foreseeable.
Hope You Brought a Map
As a Metroidvania game, Betrayer: Curse of the Spine has many of the familiar characteristics present in staples of the genre. Players will find a large maze-like map occupied by multiple different environments within it, shortcuts to be discovered or created through manipulating the environment and movement abilities, and revealing secrets found in nooks and crannies. The bread and butter is here, it is done well, and can best be described as a mix of ingenuity, skill, and a bit of redneck engineering.
One of the ways in which this formula is improved in the preview is the presence of the crafting system, where the player is able to create objects to assist platforming around the map. These objects include boxes, springs, and floating platforms that move left and right. This system made exploration very rewarding in the preview by having me create my own paths throughout the map, that I used constantly and rebuilt them when they were destroyed by monsters. The game in turn forces the player to act as a bridge builder, forging their own path through the unknown land.
Other than physical objects that can be crafted, the player can use upgrade points to unlock new ways of traversing the map such as the ability to slide on walls and jump off them. There’s even a double jump and a quadruple jump that can be unlocked with upgrade points. By combining these elements of exploration, the experience becomes smooth and pleasurable because nothing feels better than stacking five boxes, putting a spring on top, and executing a perfect double jump to find bountiful treasure.
Puzzles are also found in the environment and they were natural with clever solutions to be found. Seeing symbols on the map and then connecting the dots to punch in a code to a secret room rewards observant players as many ways to progress through the game are done by flipping switches, solving riddles, or activating glowing stones. These puzzles present a nice change of pace in the preview and give a nice break from ruthlessly exterminating the kobalt problem in the castle. The puzzles never felt too hard nor unfair from what I was able to play and often, puzzles are in conjunction with exploration as many switches and glowing stones are found in strange and normally unreachable places. It makes stacking boxes a much more useful skill than players may first think.
There are also jumping puzzles to be found, such as timing jumps to dodge automatic arrow machines, getting around spikes, or jumping around destructive balls of magic. These jump puzzles were well made and also gave a good break. However these puzzles can also be a nightmare, because if players need to backtrack they better remember how to do the jump course, but backwards. These little courses added to the danger present around the world and instead of the game challenging the player’s sword-swinging hands, it challenges their ability to not get hit by green slimes falling from the sky. I found the difficulty of the puzzles in the preview to be suitable for the world that I had slashed and shot through, and made me become very acclimated to the movement in a short amount of time.
How Do You Make a Health Potion?
Crafting is an important mechanic in Betrayer: Curse of the Spine. Unlike some games where crafting soon becomes obsolete, managing your inventory of resources is always important, especially for wood planks, water phials, or green herbs. Even after 10 hours in the preview, I may be maxed out on feathers with 99 of them but my Home Depot spoils are down to a measly five planks. These resources were most often and most consistently acquired by slaying the many enemies that are populating the map. This made backtracking serve a purpose beyond just getting to the next area, instead acting as an errand run for materials, health potions, poison cures, arrows, mines, springs, boxes, and more.
Resources are your lifeline to exploration, health recovery and, of course, explosive means of destruction. It feels important to stock up when I can and to always have a reserve in case of emergency. Nothing is worse than reaching for your quiver and finding no arrows and when you look in your inventory there’s no stone, but when you look up all you see is a massive spider creature. Often running around at the speed of sound through the maps and dodging all the enemies will only lead to a player being a couple planks short of making a jump.
The Sounds and Sights of the Spine of the Cursed
Betrayer: Curse of the Spine features a detailed pixel art style with both bright, colorful forests and deep, dark caverns and grungy castles. But what makes this game shine are the details and the lighting in it. There is an active day and night cycle that runs, with sunny forests becoming dark and a bit spooky in the night time. The details found within the pixels gives it great depth, such as the vines tangled in the spider-like legs of the Root Mother boss or the little mechanism in the bow and arrow machine.
This is exemplified in the cave areas, as torches and fire pits grant small blots of light in the dark tunnels made up of cascading, rough stone walls. Enemies never look more scary than when dimly lit next to a campfire. The dark presents danger as well with some enemies hiding in the black void and a bit of mystery as some shortcuts are hidden in the darkness of night and are found much easier under the sun.
The soundtrack is done well with many tracks fitting the atmosphere of the game with some rustic guitar to intense battle music. The sound design is executed nicely with numerous screeches of monsters sounding other-worldly and sword strikes on walls making a nice clanging sound, as the sizzle of a critical strike pleasantly indicates that the ogre you attacked won’t be standing up.
Conclusion
Betrayer: Curse of the Spine has a good start and it makes me eager to see it upon release, but there are still some hiccups that should be solved. Most of these are minor, with many of these little problems boiling down to moving an object a bit farther away or putting enough headroom above a ladder so that you can dismount it. The only major bug that I found was that a mini boss seemingly got stuck in a loop while I was fighting it. It happened numerous times but wasn’t consistent thus making me conclude that it is a bug of some kind. With those minor bug bears solved, I find that the direction that the game is taking to be enjoyable and I find it’s gameplay fun and engaging. The mixture of upgrading your abilities, crafting items, and exploring the map works well in tandem with each other and the challenge present in the game creates a great sense of accomplishment. If the released game continues what the preview has done, then any player who loves Metroidvania games should be on the lookout for Betrayer: Curse of the Spine.
