I say this with as much self-consciousness as I can as a 40-year-old who often writes about how things were in the 1990s (did you hear about it?), but it’s true that nostalgia can be a poisonous impulse. It’s easy to succumb to the call of its siren, trapping our precious time in the memory of what was rather than what is and what could be. But I also think it’s important to look at our past and put it into context, use the knowledge of the present to sift through the ashes of the past and find what really was there. Purposeful nostalgia can move mountains in our collective understanding of the present.
cursea new indie video game from Toronto-based studio Killjoy Games, is an exercise in storytelling through a nostalgic lens, where you sit in the driver’s seat of a teenager named Girl who only exists within the confines of her bedroom, perfectly square against the backdrop of the 1990s.
Girl, you learn, is coming to terms with the abuse her father suffered and coming to terms with the trauma of her mother’s death. To help herself through the immediacy of her emotional rage, she turns to the most reliable pillars: pop culture, magic, tarot, and her acquaintance, a white cat (which may or may not be real). The only other character we encounter in the short but memorable game, Girl’s familiar is the prism through which Girl’s emotional state filters into the light.
curse is nostalgic in design, modeled after the point-and-click adventure games of the 90s once popularized by studios such as Sierra Online (King’s Quest, Larry leisure suit) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island). Leaning into the shape of the era to embrace storytelling within a long lost time period is effective framing, using the form and function of the past to tell a more compelling story in it, all while we speaking from the wisdom of the elapsed time.
It’s easy to lose ourselves in the thrill of nostalgic beats when we talk about the past. In the 90s, we can forever talk about our love for The X-Files of Nirvana, Doc Martens on our feet and flannel shirts tied around our waists. But what’s harder to get to is the gist of what all these bits of ephemera meant, how they touched us, and the ways they shaped us.
curse boldly tries to go deeper than nostalgia, with varying degrees of success. While most pop culture references are sly winks and nods — posters litter Girl’s wall with pop culture touchstones like Baz Luhrman’s Romeo+Juliet gently renamed Boy + Girl — but the conversation that ensues is mostly superficial. While interacting with the X Files analog, you can choose to have Girl talk about her crush on one or both stars. You’re free to pick queer options when you swoon over 90’s hearts. But the references feel more winks and nods that deep exploration. Too often the references felt like something in the back of my mind was saying, do you get it? with a wink and a nudge.
It’s an easy trap to fall into. After all, these references are fun, and isn’t it a fun trap to be in? It’s a pleasant thrill to click through Girl’s room and make subtle nods here and there, and it’s in this part of the story that I feared we’d slipped too far into nostalgia for no purpose. When Girl, with a nudge from the player, talks about her crush on the Dana Scully stand-in, she’s referring to a modern girl, and her queerness is an unspoken extension of that. This fact is being noticed and has passed too quickly, and I wish we had spent more time unpacking and living in what was the gay politics of the 90s and the often rampant homophobia that was ubiquitous in the media.
It’s a triumph that Girl can express her queerness. I only wish more was spent dissecting what that might mean and how hard it would have been to be so open, even with oneself, in the ’90s – let alone in the context of living at home. with an abusive father and a distant stepmother.
This is a delicate line to walk, a danger of leaning too hard in nostalgia, but just as much of falling into rose-colored glasses. It’s easy to look back at the 90s and our understanding of our own youthful queerness from afar, but where I had hoped to connect with how difficult it was for many people to understand queerness in the 90s, I acceptance came too easily.
This is not to say that queerness feels forced or flawed. Girl is very sure of her quirk, she even goes so far as not to want to go back in the closet when you try to click on the one in her room.
In fact, where the queerness feels strongest and most grounded is Girl’s relationship with magic. I mean fuck, the game is literally called Curses. Like Girl’s infatuation with the men and women of ’90s popular media, her relationship with magic is fluid, a river that changes course forever. During a single playthrough, you will guide Girl through the world of magic as dictated by her changing mood. Selecting a point on a pentagram with moods like Woeful or Vengeful puts Girl in a new emotional state and changes her relationship to the world of her bedroom, her conversation with her acquaintance, and indeed her relationship to the situation she finds herself in.
Girl feels trapped, to the extent that so many young people are stuck at home with bad situations falling deeper and deeper into worse terrain. Magic is a tool that gives her the language she needs to process where she is and to process her feelings of depression, anxiety and isolation. Words we didn’t always have the best terms for in the 90s, but neither did Girl. She’s just mad at that irreconcilable way teenagers are when they don’t have the language to describe themselves. At one point in my playthrough, she plugged a mixtape into her stereo and unleashed a loud cacophony of grunge-era aesthetics. Girl is angry and frustrated at the time and lacks the ability to do anything other than thrash.
There are ten endings to the game, according to the press kit, which can be played relatively quickly, albeit with a large number of tangents for Girl to lose herself in. I played through to the end and chose self-care as my final. I wanted Girl to be okay because anyone who’s been to her in one way or another can look back and tell her that it’s actually going to be okay. That choosing to take care of herself is the best way for her to look back on her childhood with the same understanding and empathy I play the game with.
What Curses wants to do is tell a story from the 90s in an authentic way, taking attributes from that era and creating an expansive diorama that provides space for storytelling and healing through magic. Cursing works wonders as a means of dealing with difficult and long-lasting trauma. A difficult task Curses handles masterfully, perhaps stemming from the strength in the diversity of the team behind its creation. Cursing never minimizes trauma, writes it off, or ignores Girl, and by extension, the player’s feelings. With a familiar, a pentagram, and other focal points of magical power, Girl can freely express her every emotion, taking advantage of each state’s strengths and weaknesses to unfurl the weight on her shoulders into the ether.
The power of Curses lies in using our own knowledge and understanding of our emotionally charged childhood to make going back to when we most needed kindness all the more effective. Within the confines of the same style of video games that many of us played in the 90s, we can find a new way to tell ourselves that it’s going to be okay, that it’s important to listen to our emotions, that we can get through this. come, and that what we feel is worth uttering. This is not nostalgia, but rather an intriguing premise of a purposeful catharsis.
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