Ever fiddled with a Ouija board, or perhaps went into the school toilets at break, looked in the mirror and repeated the name of a dead student three times for them to appear behind you? We’re all familiar with urban myths and curses, and the teens in The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation are no different.
Legend has it that a boy and a girl were madly in love and agreed to elope, meeting on a bridge at midnight. Alas, the boy never showed, and either through a broken heart or impatience, the girl throws herself off, committing suicide. Her resolve? To haunt and terrorise the students of a university campus.
Six students get wind of this and decide to repeat a ritual, seeing if they can summon the spirit and count fourteen steps instead of thirteen. Don’t ask. They intend to stream an elaborate prank, but it goes horribly wrong when the evil entity appears, possesses a doll, and hunts the students down. That’ll teach ’em.
The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation Review (PS5)
The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation begins when HsinChiao must escape the doll. Get caught, and she has to repeat the sequence, so sprint for the nearest loo, wait it out and return to the faculty. Oh yeah, hiding in a portaloo granted the first trophy: Protected By Divine Power. Right…
From here, you unite with the team and de-brief with the sceptics. A quick puzzle, and then you’re onto the next step, only there’s no threat, hence the walking simulator reference. While the visuals are pretty damn good, it’s incredibly dark and severely underpopulated.
Upon returning to HsinChiao’s room, it reveals her troubled past. Cue a cutscene of self-harm which you can’t skip. If this triggers you, leave the room and make a cup of tea, or don’t play it. There is a disclaimer at the beginning, and for once, it’s accurate.
If It Weren’t For You Meddling Kids…
I initially thought The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation was exclusively HsinChiao’s story, but you play all six teens, going back and forth as if playing distinct chapters. There’s some rinse and repeat of locating objects that delve into their pasts, but it adds depth to the story and presents some intrigue without each being one-dimensional.
The current objective briefly flashes, so accessing your mobile will remind you what to do and view items collected thus far – both usable and artefacts that add to the story. Aside from in-game, you can view the things you’ve collected so far from the main menu.
The story was the strongest point, but The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation gameplay is a mixed bag. In the first half, there’s a lot of wandering and next to no difficulty when solving the puzzles. Each room will automatically lock until completion, meaning the item or solution you seek is there. But that wasn’t the issue. It was the action sequences.
High Spirits
Unable to attack, the spirit will kill you instantly, and you repeat the section. There are no manual saves, so this can get frustrating. Very frustrating. One area involved locating three items before being killed, and the exploration window is tiny. This applies to chase sequences where you hide in a locker or crawl at a teeth-pulling speed. To top that, enemies can run through walls. And no, they aren’t ghosts. It’s painful.
While Eastasiasoft and Softstar’s game features decent enough voice acting and subtitles, but there’s a lot lost in translation with frequent typos, House of the Dead-like indifferent responses that make no sense at tense moments, like LinEn, facing death, calls the entity a stupid ghost and scolds them. Hhmmm.
The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation storyline and folklore was enough of a carrot dangler to push through its flaws, but why don’t they answer their phones? You have a mobile, similar to SENSEs: Midnight, but other than the story bits, nobody, absolutely nobody, picks up the phone when you call. Also, one of the characters performs the biggest gaming shit I’ve ever seen.
Verdict
The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation is a graphic game – from self-harm to dodgy bowels, but it’s not gratuitous throughout. As mentioned, the chase mechanics and basic puzzles let it down, but there’s a story in there, and for me, it’s worth seeing through to the end.
