Escape the Red Curse

Escape the Red Curse is a short firstperson escape room puzzle game that traps you inside a cursed apartment with your missing teammates, a ringing phone, and a whole lot of black magic. You play as one of the city's best cursebreakers, part of an organization that deals with paranormal threats. What was supposed to be a routine job went sideways, you lost your memory, your team scattered, and now you have to find them, break the curse, and get out before it's too late.

The setup is genuinely creepy. You wake up in an apartment with another person nearby and a phone ringing. After answering it, a voice tells you that you need to save everyone and find a way out. It turns out you and four other people are part of a team dealing with paranormal activity. After trying to get rid of whatever possessed the apartment, you lost part of your memory and ended up trapped inside. Some doors and objects have squares drawn on them with colored chalk three colors, and trying to interact with them without the right chalk will hurt you. Get hurt three times in quick succession and you die, though you can recover by waiting a few moments between hits. Death sends you back to the main menu, but you can simply press Continue and jump back in without losing any progress.

The core gameplay is classic escape room exploration. You move around, crouch, and interact with objects. Nothing is highlighted, so you have to get close, aim the dot in the center of the screen at an object, and wait for an interaction prompt to appear. There's plenty to examine, and you never know what might turn out to be important. Most interactions give you a short comment, while others unlock new conversation topics with your colleagues or the strange froglike creature locked inside a cage. These conversations often point you in the right direction or reward you with useful items. Your overall goal is to search the apartment and find the items needed to break the curse, the most important ones being the three colored chalks.

What makes it stand out is the curselifting mechanic. Once you have the correct chalk and interact with a cursed door or object, the game starts a timed sequence where the room fills with fog or darkness and you need to search for clues. The solution is randomized every time, so you can't brute force these sections by memorizing the answer. Even the locations of the clues change with each attempt. Entering the wrong sequence hurts you, while entering the correct one removes the curse and lets you continue. It's a genuinely tense system that keeps you on edge, though the chalk puzzles themselves are the weakest part of the game, the white chalk puzzle asks you to find glowing runes hidden inside a gray, fogfilled room, and they're incredibly difficult to spot. The black chalk puzzle is a bit better, asking you to wake up five severed heads before they fall asleep again. The final red chalk puzzle avoids these issues entirely.

It was developed by a solo developer, and released on June 29, 2026. It runs on Windows 7 64bit or higher, with an i56300HQ, 8 GB RAM, and a GTX 560 at minimum. You'll only need 400 MB of storage space.

The reception so far is small but positive, it's sitting at 100% positive from 5 user reviews on Steam. One reviewer noted that with enough patience and stubbornness, you can finish the game in around two hours. They praised the decent story, nice puzzles, and good atmosphere, but weren't a fan of the curselifting mechanic, saying it felt more annoying than fun. It's a mixed bag depending on what you're looking for, but for the price, it's a solid short horror experience.

Who's it for?

If you like escape room games like The Room or The House of Da Vinci, this is worth a look. If you enjoy short horror experiences you can finish in one or two sittings, it delivers that. It's also for players who want a cheap, selfcontained puzzle game with a dark atmosphere and don't mind a few rough edges. And if you're the kind of person who likes supporting solo developers and discovering hidden gems before everyone else does, this one's practically invisible right now.

If the game has sparked your fascination, I wish you luck in coming out on top!