Curse Carrier - Thoughts by archivebro

So, I’m caught up on Curse Carrier now. The start had me leery at first. It opens with “have sex or die” and we go from there? Seems tailored to grab the horny crowd. Then anons start talking to their neighbor who seems a little too into gadgets, and it turns out she’s actually a super-smart, paranoid, and anxiety-prone genius who can easily make millions? Too much power escalation too quick for me, and it didn’t settle right until I later read the inspiration for a quest.

It’s envisioned as a type of dating sim, and the choices at the beginning on what to do were the “routes” to different girls. Suddenly everything fit into place.

As I kept reading, my mind jumped to a VN I played a long time ago. I don’t think it was a big one, especially since it had some bugs in the later stages that kept me from unlocking some upgraded activities and meant I never completed the “final” route. The high-level overview is largely unimportant, but the big takeaway from it is that for 75% of the game you were wooing teenage girls in a normal school setting. In the last 25% you find out your girlfriend is a robot, or was dead and possessed by a demon, or you and your girlfriend prevent reality collapse from alternate dimensions etc. etc. All absolutely insane things that had basically no buildup at all. It was pretty fun seeing all the different ways the game could go.

That game was Shira Oka: Second Chances, and is apparently the biggest inspiration for the quest as I found out later. I’m shocked to have met anyone else who played the game. This quest feels like the first 5% of it was the initial route picking that was the 75% in SO, while the rest of it is the backend 25% with how much things suddenly ramped up. And that’s okay, because trying to do it SO’s way would have had a lot of anons upset at the sudden genre shift later on.

Back on track, once I thought of the beginning and gameplay in VN terms, the girlfriends being so OP (or not, in one route not chosen) in their own ways makes sense. As much as anons are running their own character, they’re also running their girl’s route with all the quirks and general insanity that brings in a world where plenty of other people are also ridiculous in both dramatic and comedic ways with their powers. It turns out getting the girl is the easy part in this quest, KEEPING her (and yourself) alive and well to enjoy some happiness is the main draw.

Having the requisite background knowledge of Shita Oka, I realize my original advice of pacing out the story over a longer period of time so anons can acclimate to the world is missing the point. The quest feels like a fever dream at some points, like the fight with Schadenfreude, compared to more “grounded” times, like the agents or the MC opening up to Etsy on his insecurities, and that’s very much an intended feature! But with that in mind… I don’t know what advice I can give since the absurdity is the charm.

There’s the overall repetition in words and such on a technical level, but that in particular is a pain point for me as a writer too. I run different variations of sentences and paragraphs through my head so often while writing that I carry verbiage over between them way too easily. I know I’ve committed that sin in these reviews more times than I’ve realized, and I don’t twinge onto it as easily as grammar or spelling errors. I only bring it up because you called it out oyurself in some posts, honestly, so take some heart in that I glazed right over it myself!

For future ideas, I know the idea of “resets” has been toyed around with so anons can go down another girl’s route. It’s not a bad idea since that’s the way a lot of VNs work, and both SO and more recent ones like Slay The Princess show those resets can be done in-universe. I don’t know if it’d make the most sense to do the resets in this world if it wasn’t planned at first. Lord knows you’d have a lot of threads ahead of you if you went that route, and you may not have the time for it later.

A new quest could give it a try though, and you could shorten the expected “lifespan” of each route so they’d only last a thread on average. That lets you flesh out the gameplay/thematic differences between the routes more thoroughly before letting anons loose in it.

Surprisingly enough, it would not be the first quest VN with time loops that I’ve read. That honor goes to Visual Novel Quest! It was a drawquest that went for the full VN experience, requiring anons to select commands, save and reload their game, and so on. It was a good one, promising “a cute and light-hearted quest” that’s could have easily fit into something like Curse Carrier quest with some tweaking, and it’s gold-rated to boot! Not bad, right? Those “guro” and “grimdark” tags were clearly just the archivist having a hoot!

[It wasn’t]

So there’s my thoughts. Not as much practical advice as I’d like to give, especially since you admitted you’re a first-timer for running a quest, but if you refined the quest too much it’d lose some of that batshit VN charm.

My best advice to learn about quests is to read more anyway. I learned writing largely through reading, and you can get a good feel for different ways to present quests to anons through what’s been done before even if it doesn’t show you all the work that goes in behind the scenes. That’s not directed to you, Curse Carrier, but to any anon wondering about running their own quests. We had “lurk moar” for a reason after all, and even after many years of lurking my first foray into namefagging as “archivebro” was pretty disastrous. There’s always ways to learn from others, especially as you start trying things and start to notice little things that QMs and anons did that you never noticed before.