Video Game / Curse of the Dead Gods

"To think I set out upon this expedition to catalogue artifacts..."

"I cannot outrun the inevitable. Each step, no matter how quickly I take it, brings me closer to my own end."

— Caradog McCallister, Codex Entry "Dead Eyes"

Curse of the Dead Gods is an isometric Action RPG Rogue Like game series from Passtech Games. It was released on February 23rd 2021 for Windows, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One after a lenghty early access phase. They player controls Caradog McCallister, an explorer on a dark and perilous quest for power. After entering an ancient temple, McCallister is cursed by the God of Death, Xbeltz'aloc. Rumors say that Xbeltz'aloc did enslave the three gods of the temple, stealing their powers, to keep mortals trapped in the temple into a endless suffering loop...

The game relies on typical roguelike mechanics: Quick reflexes, learning the attack patterns of your enemies and creating powerful combinations of items or skills (in the form of relics) to survive the increasingly difficult waves of opponents as the player battles through the shrines of the three gods. As they progress, so does the curse — to devastating effect.

The game was quite well-received during its early access; however, it was overshadowed by the success of Hades, which was published around the same time. In comparison to Hades, this game is Darker and Edgier and features a Mayincatec aesthetic while its competitor borrows from Greek Mythology.

Has a wiki here.

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This game provides examples of:

• Adventurer Archaeologist: Caradog McCallister did not quite end up doing what he came into the temple to do.
  McCallister: To think I set out upon this expedition to catalogue artifacts and decipher ancient glyphs of the Chatac Civilization...
• All for Nothing: If, by some miracle, McCallister finds a way back to civilization with his sanity and memory of these horrible events intact, he laments that he will receive the opposite of the fame and respect he set out for. At best, no one will believe him and think he went looney on the trip, at worst, they'll think he turned from a respectable archeologist to a writer of bizarre, disturbing fiction.
  McCallister: (on the Headless Guardian) To think I set out upon this expedition to catalogue artifacts and decipher ancient glyphs of the Chatac Civilization. If through some miracle I am able to dig myself out of these cursed corridors, to one day recount the full extent of my encounters, my peers shall bury me in derision.
  
  "Today I battled a warrior with no head - it had been severed from his body long ago by the God of Death, and yet still he fought." Should I write that, they would take me for a writer of weird fiction, to be shelved alongside the works of parlor mediums, alienists and scribes of strange bestiaries.
  • The residents of the temple are not immune to this, as the other poor souls trapped in it have mused on.
  Pablo Cordoba: (on the Death Wives) Xbeltz'aloc spoke to me of the virgin widows of the Jaguar God, T'amok'. How they moaned when he killed their husband's champions. How they lament for their lives sacrificed for nothing.
• Animal Motifs: The three gods of the temple. T'amok' the Jaguar God, Yaatz the Eagle Goddess, and Sich'al the Serpent Goddess. Each of them has followers which resemble their respective animal. Yaatz controls harpies, Sich'al is prayed to by Serpent Cultists while T'Amok' simply sends Infernal Jaguars to do his bidding.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Bestiary Entries in the codex are quite bleak and devoid of hope. They even feature quotes from other apocalyptic logs, taking this trope up to eleven.
• Arc Symbol: Xbeltz'aloc's mark, three purple diamonds that form an upside-down triangle, is highly prominent.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: From what McCallister can decipher from what history and recordings are left at this point, the Chatac all made offerings and contracts to the three Gods of Wonder T'amok, Yaatz, and Sich'al in exchange for some benefit like immortality, power, and knowledge, respectively. Even before the whole God of Death business, they caused their followers no shortage of suffering, inhumane costs, and madness, either because they left out certain important parts of it because they didn't feel it was important or it specifically benefited them.
• BFS: Some of the weapons in the "Heavy" category are swords twice as big as the Player Character is tall.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Like the real-life Ancient American deities they were based off and the limited information we're given, it's hard to assign a "goodness" or "evilness" to any of the gods' actions. Are they sadistic, cruel, all-powerful beings using mortals as their pawns for their own purposes, or do they just honestly believe that any step closer to godhood via servitude to them is worth the insanity, unquenchable thirst for blood, and having your mortal body twisted to such horrific states? They're so powerful and beyond any concept of humanity and our values, not to mention the omniscience of Sich'al made it impossible for Pablo Cordoba and her to have any sort of meaningful discussion; it's like a respected genius in their twilight years trying to converse with a newborn child.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: T'amok is associated with the color red, Yaatz with blue, and Sich'al with green. This even extends to the color palette in their respective temples, and of their minions.
• Crossover: Since April 2021, it has one with fellow roguelike Dead Cells.
• Cursed with Awesome: Many of the curses the player accumulates during his forays into the temple are actually quite helpful under the right circumstances. Losing health instead of corruption during sacrifices can be great if you carry an item which lets you reclaim health during combat, for example. The same goes for the cursed weapons, which offer a high-risk high-reward playstyle.
• Deadly Gas: Noxious fumes emerge from certain spots in Sich'al's temple. They will poison the player if he walks through them. They can be set on fire with the torch or another source of fire, which will make them explode. This can be quite beneficial to the player, as it will hurt enemies and sometimes even destroy walls that hide secret rooms.
• Death of a Child: Yaatz the Eagle Goddess has taken the unborn children of their followers and turned them into living weapons. The little pests are quite deadly too, as they wield lightning powers as the result of these experiments.
• Elemental Powers: Each of the gods has his or her element. T'Amok' seems to favor fire. His temple features flamethrower traps, explosive urns and floor grills while being decorated in orange and red tones. Yaatz' temple complex is clearly inspired by the element of air, with its wind and electrical traps, its suspension bridges and its flying enemies. Sich'al's followers dwell within the earth, where poison traps and astonishingly aggressive roots threaten the player.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Played with. Xbeltz'aloc isn't nice, but if anything, the pantheon he sealed is worse than him, and it's implied he did so to stop them menacing humanity. Flavor text from curses shows he has a major case of Blue-and-Orange Morality going on, seeing his curses as gifts to help people actualize themselves.
• Flunky Boss: Dark Avatar of the Serpent will periodically summon three Elite Serpent Cultists, and will sacrifice them to heal himself if the player fails to kill them in time.
• Foreshadowing: In the Bestiary, both McCallister and others before him note the irony and the tragedy of the previous Gods and their followers now all being made the playthings and servants of Xbeltz'aloc. On the Titan Skulls, McCallister writes:
  I have died so many times that I've began to develop a taste for it. Is that what Xbeltz'aloc seeks? Is he teaching me to crave the passage from life to the mysteries beyond? I fear he has something far more debasing in mind. I fear I am being prepared to become his champion.^SpoilerHe is, in the True Ending.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Any person who receives a sliver of knowledge from Sich'al, the Serpent Goddess of Divine Sight and Perception, goes completely and utterly mad. It's not the content but the quantity, so vast it's like pouring an ocean's worth of water into a bucket, upon which it is utterly destroyed from the pressure. Sich'al knows this happens to her followers but never tells them, as she's also aware that them backing out won't benefit her.
• Irony: Xbeltz'aloc is the god of death, and head of the Gods of Pain, yet he causes far less of both than the Gods of "Wonder".
• I Will Find You: Marie-Clothilde Pardieux entered the temple not to gain power but to search for her lost brother, Clovis. She is too late. Clovis has become the Champion of Death, protector of Xbeltz'aloc, too far gone to be restored to a normal life. The Codex implies that it is Marie-Clothilde's presence which fuels his resolve, as she refuses to fight him.
• Jerkass Gods: Perhaps because they were divinity, the three Gods of Wonder didn't particularly care about the lives, sanity, and humanity of their mortal followers. They would oftentimes omit important information about the consequences of their blessings, subject the rest of the world to sadistic, superpowered rulers in the form of their Champions, or simply drive their followers to indiscriminate massacres of neighboring tribes and each other in order to appease them with blood sacrifices.
• Limited Loadout: The player can only ever carry three weapons into the temple. One for the main hand, one for the secondary hand and a two-handed weapon to which one can switch even mid-battle, but which cannot profit from the synergy effects that the other weapons may possess.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Many of the manifestations of the Gods powers and boons to their followers turn them into gruesome, inhumane monsters. One especially prominent example is Yaatz, who was fond of intentionally making the biological bodies into mechanical abominations.
• Mad Scientist: Yaatz the Eagle goddess has traits of this. Her temple is filled to the brim with ancient devices that crackle with eldritch energies. Yaatz seems to have been quite fond of experimentation on bodies as well, judging by the state of the temple's inhabitants.
• Mayincatec: A fantasy version, no less.
• Multiple Endings:
  • Normal Difficulty Ending: McCallister defeats the Champion of Dead and picks up the only thing left of it, its mask. As he turns it around to inspect the user's side, it suddenly tries to latch onto his face, pulling itself towards his head using magic tendrils. Barely able to hold it back, McCallister stabs himself with the mask rather than let it posses him.
  • "Xbeltz'aloc's Revelation" (Hardest, at time-of-writing) Ending: Same as before, but when McCallister picks up the mask, this time it does not grab him, and he willingly puts it on, becoming the new Champion of Death. His final journal entry states that he could have finally left and returned home, but Xbeltz'aloc told him doing so would also free the Gods of Wonder to influence humanity again. Realizing their "gifts" to the modern world would doom humanity, he chose to become his new champion and guardian to keep them imprisoned. Although he cannot leave, one "perk of the job" is that he can allow others to, and Marie is finally able to leave, her brother's remains in tow, to bury him and find a new life in a new century.
• My Skull Runneth Over: The end result of accepting Sich'al's offering of omniscience.
• Power at a Price: Two examples.
  • McCallister can offer gold or blood to the altars to gain new weapons and powers, though he wonders how much of his soul and humanity is being offered regardless of which currency.
  • The enemies of the temples were the followers of the Gods, sacrificing their sanity, their resources, or other humans in order to gain something in return, be it unparalleled killing ability, knowledge, or immortal life. Even before Xbeltz'aloc came into the picture, the consequences were gruesome and not worth the asking price.
• Revenge: Marie-Clothilde Pardieux states that her brother entered the temple in an attempt to exact vengeance upon those that had wronged their family, by gaining the power of a god. He becomes the Champion of Death, protector of Xbeltz'aloc.
• Secret Room: Can be found in every temple, usually behind cracked walls. The player will need a two-handed hammer to open them, though — or he can simply let an enemy or a trap with an explosive attack do the job.
• Shout-Out: The developers show their love for other games in their own work.
  • Diablo II: K'ax taca, High Lord of the Storm, the first boss of the Eagle Temple, is visually inspired by Mephisto. His attacks, interestingly enough, are those that Diablo himself uses.
  • The Dead Cells crossover update brought plenty of these:
    • Three of the weapons added are identical to ones found in Dead Cells, just with different names — the Sword of Conjunctivius was that game's Cursed Sword, the Broadsword of the Knight was the Broadsword, and the Crossbow of the Condemned was the Explosive Crossbow.
    • Vault rooms are meant to evoke the cursed chests from Dead Cells, though they work somewhat differently. Whereas cursed chests gave you a powerful item and required you to kill enemies without getting hit to keep it, you have to kill all the enemies in a vault room without getting hit and then you get what's in the chest.
    • The Curse of the Headless makes McCallister sport the Beheaded's flaming head.
• Sword and Gun: The starting weapon set is a machete and a pistol.
• Temple of Doom: Three of them, no less. Ty'atanwic, the Jaguar Temple, dedicated to the Jaguar God T'amok', Hucawic, the Eagle Temple, the abode of Yaatz the Eagle Goddess, and Chucwic, the Serpent Temple, dedicated to Sich'al the Serpent Goddess. Each of them comes with their own variety of deadly traps and enemies.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Sich'al was omniscient and promised the same to her followers. What she knows full well and willingly keeps from her followers is that her knowledge is impossible for a mortal mind to comprehend, any piece of her divine knowledge will utterly overwhelm their minds, drive them insane, and give her a new mindless slave to use for her purposes.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: From what little we know of Xbeltz'aloc, McCallister theorizes he is this, trapping the Gods of Wonder and their followers in the temples to prevent them from tempting any more mortals to lose their humanity and gain some sliver of divinity. As benevolent as it is of a goal to keep any more superpowered, insane, and highly-technologically advanced fanatics from terrorizing the rest of the world, McCallister vehemently disagrees that this endless cycle of death and painful resurrection is the answer. In the true ending, McCallister realizes he's right after all.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: If you happen to have a darkness-element weapon (or are carrying a curse that makes your torch dark instead of light), using it to extinguish a burning enemy immediately wounds and Breaks them, leaving them open for more damage.