Our Cursed Companions community has grown significantly since our last update, and we've got so much feedback and love and encouragement from them all. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you.❤️ We're trying our best and working tirelessly to make improvements.
After hearing from you and watching streamer feeds, we found some of the pain points, fixed some bugs, made some improvements and tweaks to the game.
Our team is small and we're trying to cover as much ground as we can, but we have to be strategic and work on those changes that can significantly improve the gameplay experience, so do forgive us if there are still bugs and things that still irk you. If there's something that can be improved, please try to reach out to us via Discord before you leave a bad review on Steam. 🙏
Since the last demo update, we spent the month and a half cooking. There have been plenty of changes and improvements. So we've put them down here. If you're too busy to read them, just see the TLDR bit. Don't forget to scroll to the end to see our roadmap for the next update.
⭐Main Highlights (TL;DR)⭐
Update for 0.9.7
For Public Demo, Build ID: 19382021
- New hotkey system: (1) Dungeon Codex (2) Spell Journal (3) Spell Torch (4) Healing Wand (5) Talking Skull.
- New Emote Wheel UI: Emotes & dances relocated to [Q] key or Middle‑mouse button
- New Talking animation now moves head accessories - you can see who’s yapping
- Traitor Mode enhanced - 3 new options + Misty Forest map: In response to feedback, there are now options to lock players in place in the voting hall, change win conditions and disable curse words in the voting hall
- Twitch Integration: Totems spawn in dungeons - Chat votes on outcomes
- New Graphics settings: Lower spec devices can play our game now. (We ran on a Intel N100 and hit 25-40fps on Low settings, 960px x 540px, blurry but playable🙂)
- Dungeon lighting made brighter
- Mouse sensitivity settings added and Invert Mouse option while Spectating
- Preloading assets on Game startup to reduce wait times on joining game sessions
🧩User Experience Improvements
- Hotkey system makes key items easier to access. You still need to scroll to get to other items or treasure
- You can now move while Spell Journal or Dungeon Codex is open
- Dungeon opening/closing now requires confirmation popup
- Guidebook auto-hides at start; new players see a one-time instruction page
- Boomer Mine → now Boomer Bomb (appearance changed, same function): Players thought it functioned like a landmine and avoided going near it. So we changed the appearance and name.
- Whispering Grimoire → now Loudmouth (appearance changed, same function): Players thought it was a spell book so they did not realise that the creature sounds were coming out of the object
- Lobby codes hidden by default
- Settings menu now accessible in the main lobby
- Curses and local notification fonts increased for readability
- UI visuals streamlined and other tweaks
⚙️Settings
- Emotes/Dances now on [Q] key or Middle‑mouse via the Emote Wheel UI
- Push-to-Talk does not trigger Curses and Curse Doors anymore (no more cheating!) but still can trigger Equipment and Monsters
- Spectator mode now has Invert Mouse option
- Adjustable Mouse Sensitivity
- Graphics Quality via XESS upscaling - this improves performance on older machines that can support XESS.
- Selectable Screen Resolution and Fullscreen/Windowed mode
- Auto-reconnect if voice chat drops - check here if you can't hear your teammates or vice versa.
- Controls (Keyboard) have been updated
🔪Traitor Mode Updates
- Option to Disable Death and Treasure curses in Voting Hall to stop abuse
- Option to freeze players during voting (blocks sabotage with Sacrificial Knife or Boomer Bomb)
- Option to allow Companions to win if all Traitors are eliminated (one Companion must survive)
- Skip-vote majority now ends meeting immediately
- Bug preventing players from leaving Voting Hall fixed
📺 Twitch Integration
- Dungeon Totems let Twitch Chat vote on outcomes (see this post - https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3265230/view/537731883551690602)
- Requires linking Twitch Creator account in-game
- Chat votes via “!number” shown on-screen
- If a non-Creator triggers a Totem, results are random
- With multiple creators, the first activator should get chat voting authority (we hope)
- Note: Behavior with shared chat across creators currently unknown
⚖️ Gameplay Balance
- Spell words now rotate every 5 minutes (was 2)
- Curse Remover now clears one random curse only (it used to clear all curses)
- Trigger range reduced for Root Golem
- Meatgrinder damage slightly increased
- Healing Wand price raised to 450 Gold
- Sacrificial Knife damage reduced; reworded to clarify that maximum value capped at 3
- Watcher now applies Poison instead of high raw damage when you enter the green gas
- Greedy Goblets slow-down reduced to 30 seconds
- Gold value of Body Parts reduced by around 50%
- Removed less-responsive curse phrase triggers
- Slightly reduced spawn rates for Black Coins and Equipment
- New room variations for Dungeon Entrance
- Removed: Steam Bath, Teleportaloo, and Dungeon Teleport Circle from Traitor Mode
- Dark Shrine options reduced to three: respawn, treasure, or extra time (most players didn't use the other options)
- Player names visible from further away when you mouse over their characters
🐞Bug Fixes
- Fixed: stuck in Traitor Hall
- Resolved: unkillable Chatterboxes and Red Annes (due to network sync)
- Partially Fixed (might still occur) : inconsistent dungeon generation across players (when players see a different dungeon from each other)
- Now possible to pick up items near dead Players
- Added spectate mode portal timer to display time left
- Late joiners (Players who join halfway when the game has started) can now spectate curse words properly
- Partially fixed (might still occur): falling through map in Dungeon
- Fixed various monster pathing/stuck issues
- Disabled arrow traps no longer deal damage
- Items from previous failed games no longer carry over
- Fixed: poison gas animation in Voting Hall (it wasn't visible the last time)
- Fixed: revived player in the Traitor mode will have the correct role (Companion or Traitor)
- Fixed a bug where players can play past Day 3 in the demo
- Fixed a bug where the arrow trap collider still kills players even though the trap is disabled
🧾Other Adjustments
- Logo intro volume turned down
- Spike trap spikes lowered slightly
- Improved background image for Scroll of Praise
- Updated designs for Dungeon Codex and Spell Journal to improve legibility
- Edited tutorial text for clarity
- Multiple Foul Moths no longer overlap each other
- New prompt added when playing Traitor Mode first time
- Cleaned up the grammar and improved the text descriptions for the Equipment, Treasures, and notifications
🐞Known Bugs
- Traitor Mode: If you revive a late joiner via the Dark Shrine, player has no role assigned in the game
- Late joiners - if they join a game midway - they are unable to hear other dead players (in spectate mode)
- Players can sometimes move when the portal open / close scene plays
🚗Roadmap
- Coming Up in the next Demo: New languages - French, German, Spanish and Chinese (Simplified)
- Working towards Early Access
- Steam Achievements
- More Twitch integrations
- New maps, new monsters, new dungeons, new traps and new game modes (we're keeping this a secret)
Thank you for reading and getting all the way to the end, there's gotta be a special achievement for this! Our wishlists are growing and the viewership on Twitch has hit over 71,000 hours watched.
We've got a date in mind for our launch and it does depend if we can hit our goals for what we want the EA version to be. We'll update you as soon as possible. In the meantime, join our Discord (https://discord.com/invite/WpmWCmgZRz) to give feedback and as always WISHLIST US!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3265230/Cursed_Companions/