You slice clean through an enemy’s arm before he even finishes his swing. Limbs fly, blood sprays, and somehow it all looks incredible. A beast charges from the left, you sidestep and cut him down before he gets close. Two seconds of total, elegant carnage. Then you glance at the clock and realize you’ve been at this for two hours.
Welcome to Cursed Blood.
From David Marquardt Studios, the Swedish team behind the award-winning roguelite shooter Dust & Neon, Cursed Blood is a 1-4 player co-op melee roguelike set in what I can only describe as a bloodpunk samurai fever dream. You play as vengeful samurai apes (yes, apes) hunting down the mafia that desecrated your sacred Shrine of Vermillion. I know. Just go with it. The premise sounds like it was thrown together from three random nouns, but the moment you actually pick up a katana and start moving, none of that matters. What matters is that it feels absolutely fantastic.
Each katana carries its own unique perk, and figuring out which one clicks with how you play is half the fun. You’ll probably burn through way more runs than you intended just experimenting. Happens to the best of us, really. Throw in World Mutations that shake up the rules of an entire run and unlock new katanas as rewards, and there’s a constant drip of reasons to dive back in.
The visuals are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The art style is dark and gritty, like Bloodborne got a violent makeover and moved to a rain-soaked criminal underworld. Rain-soaked streets, glowing shrines, blood-powered machinery humming in the background, a whole aesthetic that commits completely to its own weird identity. The blood effects are absurdly over-the-top, which is clearly very much the point.
Combat is the real star, though. It’s fast, readable, and has that satisfying snap to it I normally associate with games like Sifu, where every successful dodge and counter feels earned rather than lucky. Blocking exists too, and it’s trickier to pull off than you’d expect, which means there’s genuine depth to master beyond just mashing attack. Bosses evolve across multiple stages, which keeps things interesting on repeat runs, and the whole loop has that addictive “one more try” rhythm that good roguelikes live and die by.
What makes all of this even better is that you don’t have to go through it alone. Cursed Blood supports 1-4 players, and what’s particularly cool is that you can mix online and local co-op in the same run. So one friend can be on the couch next to you while another joins from across the world. Four samurai apes tearing through a bloodpunk world together sounds like complete chaos, and honestly that’s probably the point.
Cursed Blood hits Early Access on April 2, but the free demo is only up until March 26. If you want to get a feel for the combat before launch day, now is the time. After that, you’re going in blind.
The Shrine of Vermillion is waiting.
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