A transformation game created by AnonymousMan using the RAGS engine.
Updates and update notes can be found at anonymousmangames.blogspot.com
Note: This game uses RAGS 2.4.16
The Player - You are a man in your mid-twenties, transformed by a woman as a punishment.
Maria - The Mysterious woman you met at the bar.
Vivian - Runs the Jewelry Store in the mall.
Genevieve - the stylist in the salon
Due to the freeform action in this game, walkthroughs are not applicable.
Please see the Cursed Wiki for possible actions in this game.
Great game all around, wish it was more developed or being continued in a new engine with multimedia additions, truly great.
Love this game since I first started playing it, but now since RAGS has updated since 2.4.16, I haven't been able to play it since it won't play on a higher version of RAGS, wish it could cause I want to play this great, amazing game again.
This game is a classic, and it is awesome. It is a simulation game, and therefore repetitive in nature, but in my opinion timelessly brilliant. I would love to see an update, but understand that the engine is at its limits with the game as it is: and that means the gamebuilder -who has only posted great games here- would have to redo the complete game in another engine: an amount of work that can be expected of nobody with any fairness. If you have not played the game but are interested in sims at all, playing is highly recommended, even if you have to download the (free) engine only for this game.
I happen to be into life sims so Cursed was right up my alley back in the day. It's still one of those games I'd love to play but returning to rags makes that downright painful. Dispite that it's one of those games I wish had jumped to a different program and had been finished. I'm glad its creator is back and working on new projects.
If there's one thing that leaps out about Cursed in the tail end of 2020, it's that RAGS is horrible. It has not aged well, and it was never ideal for these kinds of games in the first place.
While Cursed does an OK job of working around it, RAGS is never helping, and the navigation systems constantly annoys.
The basic premise is that you're instantly transformed into a woman and have to live a normal life. A rather sad, lonely, normal life at that, because there are very few characters you can form any kind of relationship with.
This is complicated by the oddity that you are transformed by the slightest whim or thought. See a woman with big boobs ... you could get big boobs. See a tall woman ... you can get tall. The slightest stray thought can turn you into a freak. A single encounter with a dominant can turn you into a submissive doormat. Except ... when it doesn't ... because random!
In terms of gameplay, Cursed is ... deeply flawed ... you invest hours and hours in grind to eventually get different irreversible outcomes, many of which are only accessible at random.
A few games have copied this kind of thing since. Some take on more of the Cursed concept than others. They have a nicer user-interface, and usually more and better things to do.
Hard Times in Hornstown is probably the best game with a lot in common with Cursed, and No Money Down Blues is probably the most obvious example of copying the thoughts-create-transforms approach, and is a far more fun and interesting game - flawed in some ways, but not as flawed as Cursed. Neither game has the whole Cursed package.
Cursed was probably awesome back when it was written, but things have moved on. It seems to lean heavily on ideas from Girl Life, which IMHO is fundamentally composed of tiny needles of sheer horror hidden within a massive haystack of pure boredom. Girl Life has a lot of loving followers who probably find that statement absurd, so I'll be more specific. GL and Cursed are both fixated on simulating tedious details of day to day actions of normal life. And in both games, most of the time those actions are incredibly mundane and uneventful, and sometimes, rarely, very rarely, something weird happens that takes the hours of time you spent grinding boring mundane chores and turns everything upside down, and the next thing you know you're being gang-raped by an entire crack-house of junkies, or you're dead, or you're a cat! Cursed has that kind of mechanic ... you labor away hoping something interesting will happen, but when it does it comes out of nowhere, you don't get any meaningful choices and it's virtually game-ending. And in Cursed, the sex scenes aren't even written most of the time! Not just sex, but many other important or potentially interesting scenes were never written and are just "Blah blah placeholder..." ... and I mean this literally. It really says that, or something very close to it.
One day you can find the game has declared your character "shy", despite the reason you're wearing dowdy clothes is that you have no money. Reading a couple of magazines and putting on some higher heels cures you of shyness. Everything feels arbitrary and changes come on suddenly and without warning. There are very few interactions with NPCs, and what is there is limited to a few pre-canned scenes with no choices involved.
A more recent take on this type of game is Accidental Woman, which retains most of the flaws of its predecessors and adds happiness mechanics that make you constantly kill yourself if you don't follow some non-obvious paths to avoid it. It's a genre that is beset by questionable game design choices and an OCD-like obsession with simulating the most uninteresting tasks in uninteresting ways. While some other games let you do those dull tasks, they always add some erotic element, but the simulation genre seems to abhor anything that would make those tasks more fun, or relevant. I guess some people really like that, and if you're one of them, Cursed may be perfect for you.
In 2020, or 2021, I don't think it's worth going back to RAGS to endure a game that drags on forever only to reveal it was never finished. No Money Down Blues is finished (sort of), and much more enjoyable to play. Hard Times in Hornstown will probably never be finished, but it's so big, there's so much to do, and the interface is good, so it's overwhelmingly a better choice. Either of those games is dramatically more fun than Cursed.
I think the only reason to play Cursed now is historical curiosity, which is basically why I looked at it. Cursed was clearly influential on the entire tfgames ecosystem, so if you want to understand that better, maybe you need to play it. If you're thinking of playing it for any other reason, I advise against it. While playing Cursed helps understand why AW has gone down such a bad path, it isn't a huge amount of fun in itself. If you're going to endure an old-fashioned clunky interface you may as well play Trap Quest, which offers far more choices and feedback.
Then again, you might think the unreasonable time investment required to get some of the weird transform outcomes is worth it. Or you might just really like that simulation of mundane chores with lots of mouse clicks genre.
The gameplay is woefully uneven, and often non-existent, erotic content is not written, the interface is awful, and you frequently run up against missing or incomplete content.