A horror game set in a Taiwanese university, The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation is set apart from your standard fare. It’s a game that challenges the player to believe to make the most out of it. It’s a game that takes you up and down across it’s puzzle solving and set pieces. And in this The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation review, we’ll discuss the highs and lows that design can bring.
The game is essentially a horror themed walking simulator with some light puzzle solving. It may not seem it at the beginning, as the very first action sequence you encounter demands precision timing. Once this challenge is overcome however, the game settles into a much more leisurely pace. There are a few further chase sequences, but these are more of an irritating aside than the main gameplay loop. It’s a game that’s more about atmosphere than action, and is all the better for it.
Playing through several chapters as the different characters in a group of students trying to recreate the drama of an urban legend, you’ll explore many locations of the university campus. Many of them will feature a handful of interactive objects, both fleshing out the setting and offering minor side distractions. There’s also many sequences in which the player is forced to stop and find specific objects. This slows the pace of the game dramatically. Across it’s 4-5 hour duration, The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation presents a pretty turbulent pacing.
The game touches on some pretty heavy themes. Rape and self harm are relatively prominent. Though handled with a light touch – and something is definitely lost in translation – they do muddy the waters when adding in the spooks and chills. It would be harsh to say the game co-opts such themes simply for adding dramatic effect. Yet The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation is a far cry from an examination or supportive work.
Visually, The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation is decidedly mediocre. It does many things right, with well designed environments and often fantastic animation (despite the lack of lip synch localisation). However, the amount of visual discrepancies is often overwhelming. Near every scene has clipping or erratic behaviour from the characters or some element of the world, breaking the immersion the game works so hard to build. If you can overlook these flaws you’re sure to find The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation‘s world full of intrigue, but otherwise they’ll be constant reminders that you’re playing a fairly low budget game.
The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation isn’t a game which you will marvel at. It’s far from a AAA horror experience, and removed fro the Dead Space‘s and Resident Evil‘s of modern horror gaming. It is a game that you’ll want to love due to its intent on doing something different. And for much of the game it succeeds. However, as you’ll have learned in this The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation review, there are many points in which the game doesn’t set out on it’s best foot. For that, it’s a game that is well presented for horror aficionados. But it may fail to find a welcoming audience in a wider demographic.
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