Worth a look, but not entirely.
I'll say it now, I was ever so glad that the copy I grabbed still had a manual at all. The first cinematic I believe without a shred of doubt in my mind would become a hideous and confusing hurdle for anyone not so lucky as to have the small backstory provided. One-such would surely find themselves wondering 'who the heck is that?' and 'why are you hunting him down, now?' and such. Half of the abilities mentioned in the manual, such as stealing, don't come around until well after the first dungeon, and for no real plot purpose of any kind. It's more along the lines of 'hey! Now you can steal stuff! Go nuts!'
Game play was rather shabby considering when it was released. The main character's movements were highly mechanical and not very fluent at all (and he runs slower than molasses). Only a few of the bosses (as far as I got, anyway) seemed to break out of that rigidness and give the impression of true, almost action-captured movement. The enemies were a bit repetitive and uncreative, merely copies of each other with, say, extra armour or different coloured skin. The dungeon's were long and very boring, simple as that. Exploring will only yield so much, and usually amounts to a total waste of time.
The fighting system wasn't too bad, fairly simple and easy to learn. Though I've noticed that in later battles, if you get paralyzed, there is absolutely NOTHING that you can do about it. You can't open the menu. You can't gain help from your ID if you happen to realise too late that you've got the wrong one fluttering at your side. Understandably, your enemies take full advantage of this; however, most just seem to be content with just hammering you with wave after wave of whatever attack that put you in that sorry state in the first place. If you get hit, be prepared to sit and wait for a while.
The ID's themselves were a toss-up between useful and just plain annoying. They level up a lot faster than you do, which isn't so bad. I wasn't getting the greatest impression with the first of the ID's, though it is a very useful companion. I just didn't think that it was too classy to give a first time player a miniature child-fairy with a massive red rock stuck where the sun don'e shine as their first partner in battle. Though I realised later that it was supposed to be representative of an insect characteristic, it still isn't... right.
Hector's motivation was well-placed, though he almost immediately seemed to me to be a very weak-willed character. His almost instant switch back to presumed 'evil' techniques to gain his revenge seemed a bit too much too quickly. The only thing that passed through my head with his resolve was 'wow, you've accepted evil pretty darn fast there, bub.'
The music was nothing short of nerve-grating. It was loud, cheesy, and highly remniscent of a bad 80's anime. It was far too cheery for something sopposedly so dark in nature.
I didn't think that the rating needed to be quite so high for this particular game. I've seen worse in games nearly fifteen years older than this one, considering not even a limb will fall from your unhappy enemy's sorry corpse as you hack at it with an axe three times your size. the only thing that could possibly justify the Mature rating plastered to this game would be the main antagonist's skimpy clothing, and the fact that he looks like a cross-dresser in desperate need of a psychiatrist.
After a few days of trudging through this rather pitiful game I wasn't sad to see it returned hastily. I'm generally a very thorough gamer, and to me it's really something that I didn't at least try to finish Curse of Darkness. It's kind of like reading books; you only toss it if it's utterly bogus. Unfortunately, Curse of Darkness was utterly bogus.