Cureocity

Cureocity is a roughly hour-long fantasy adventure built around a duo: a fresh-faced rookie adventurer and a former mercenary now reassigned as a healer, working their way through a jungle dungeon together. The two characters sit at opposite ends of a personality spectrum — one all enthusiasm and doll-like cheer, the other reserved and traditional — and most of the writing is in how their dynamic shifts as the dungeon reveals more of itself and of them.

Combat is hand-based in a literal sense. Each character has a left hand and a right hand, and what you load into them — weapons, items, specific gestures — determines your attack profile, defensive stats, and the kinds of enemies you can effectively counter. Encounters often involve discussing tactics with your partner and reconfiguring your hands mid-fight, especially when you meet contaminated monsters that can be purified rather than killed. Many of those decisions feed back into the ending you reach.

The developer, Bread On Board, is a four-country collective formed during the BOOOM CHALLENGE game jam organised by GCORES, where an earlier demo of Cureocity won the event's Most Popular Game award. The full version expands that 21-day prototype into a complete short story, and is published under GCORES Publishing's indie label, which grew out of the same jam programme.