The Bridge Curse is a Taiwanese horror game based on the 2020 movie of the same name, following a group of six students at Tunghu University in a club investigating, among other things, an urban legend surrounding a bridge on campus said to be haunted by the vengeful ghost of a mysterious woman. I was intrigued at the prospect since I can't say that, to my knowledge, I've played a game that was based on a movie that wasn't a blockbuster or part of a major franchise. This also meant that after I finished the game, I was able to watch the movie and compare the two since it was conveniently on Netflix. While the game definitely felt unique in some ways, I ultimately left it fairly unimpressed, but not entirely disappointed.

Movie poster for The Bridge Curse (2020)

The story of the game is fairly involved and I personally found it pretty hard to follow. Part of this was because the audio is all in Taiwanese Mandarin and while I do prefer to play such a game with the native language audio anyway, I played it on stream with a couple friends and could only follow the subtitles so well. Regardless though, there's definitely some twists and oddities to the story that I don't want to spoil but do make it a bit more complicated than it needed to be as some things are purposefully contradictory for a while. Interestingly though, the plot, while similar in some ways to the movie, deviates substantially from its source material and includes several new antagonists and scares as well as some different characters and a different timeline. I found the movie also a little hard to follow, if less so, but ultimately wasn't too fond of it, despite some good twists.

The Bridge Curse is a surprisingly good-looking game. It's not top-tier graphically and some assets are rough around the edges, but for a game I doubt many people worldwide have even heard of, the environments have a lot of detail and the characters look quite good with emotive animation that brings their expressions and speech to life. Sometimes this was to my detriment as this is definitely the game with the most graphically detailed image of a big pile of human feces in a toilet that I've seen, a record I hope not to break anytime soon. But otherwise, I appreciated the graphics that added to the cinematic feel of the game. It's also cool that, unsurprisingly, the environments look like very close recreations of several of the locations in the film.

Much of the game has us switching between each of the six students to experience their particular scares and sometimes deaths as the hauntings they were investigating come alive (you didn't see that coming, did you?). The characters each have fairly distinct backgrounds and personalities as well as areas of study. While the characters were distinct, for a game that clocks in at around 4-5 hours, it was hard to not only get to know them all, but keep straight who had which traits and was involved in which relationship. It was still neat learning about the characters and their relationships through their cellphones which you're able to browse any time you're controlling that character. You can see their personalized background and view their text message history, much of which comprises texts with the other characters. While it would probably annoy a lot of players to have to read a ton of these texts just to get that characterization, I thought it was a nice touch.

One thing I would like to note is that early in the game there was an extremely graphic scene of self-harm that I really didn't feel was necessary. I'm not sure I've ever seen such an explicit in-your-face depiction of self-mutilation that shows most everything. I have to think this was primarily included for shock value, especially considering later another character recognized these tendencies, which would've accomplished the same revelation and plot thread without the visual trauma. The start of the game contains a trigger warning regarding this to an extent, but I didn't feel it was adequate as it merely mentions that the game contains plots involving self-mutilation and other mature themes and awkwardly is just like "please do not attempt to recreate these events in real life." Anyway, it didn't personally affect me, but I definitely think it was something that needed better content warnings if it was going to be that graphic. I'm not sure if such warnings have made their way into Taiwanese media, but I thought I'd leave such a warning here for what it's worth.

While the presentation is otherwise pretty good for the game, I ultimately didn't find it all that scary, unless you count a good number of jump scares, some of which are kind of intentionally funny. Other than that, the scenes that do involve monsters or pursuers vary from annoying stealth segments to frustrating hide and seek, both of which often result in silly deaths until you find just the right sequence to get through. There's pretty good atmosphere with the weirdly-deserted campus at night but at most this offers an eerie and unsettling tone that isn't very well followed up on.

There are a few puzzles in the game but they're very standard puzzles you've seen in several other games. As a fan of puzzles in horror games, I didn't find they really added much to the game other than to slow things down a bit. But I guess I didn't really mind them being there either for a change of pace to keep it from being just a walking sim.

I learned about The Bridge Curse from a list of horror games from various Asian countries. Part of what I came for was seeing these differing cultural approaches to horror games and storytelling. I think in that sense, the game delivered. For one, the movie/game is based on a real urban legend of the haunted bridge of Tunghai University. There's also little in the way of hand-holding for a Western audience, a lot of the game felt authentically Taiwanese. While I wish the rest of the game were done better and think it really should have cut down (or at the very least, done better to warn about) some of its shock value content, I am ultimately still glad I played it.