Parent's Guide: Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God is a turn-based role playing game known as a rogue-like, with a decent sense of humour, and more than a slight obsession with curry.

Playing as Pupuru, a loyal customer of a local curry shop known as Smile Curry, it's up to you to leap into action when a rival national chain rolls into town and threatens to put it out of business. How do you do this? By scouring the land for the ultimate curry ingredients, in order to create the ultimate curry, of course!

What follows is essentially a series of dungeons, that you have to fight your way through, from the ground floor to the very top, bashing monsters, collecting items, and - you guessed it - even making curries as you go. As a rogue-like, Sorcery Saga is turn-based in the extreme - rather than just having turn-based battles, instead, it's the entire game that's turn-based, as your enemies will only move, or attack, when you're on the move yourself. Stand still, and they'll stay locked in a stare-down with you - which, if nothing else, at least gives you time to think.

But that being said, despite its cutesy graphics, Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God is hard. Really hard. While you level up, and gain more health by defeating monsters, as soon as you finish the one dungeon, your level will reset, and you'll be back to square one for the next, with no stat increases, and no extra health. If you die, you lose all of your items, and all of your money - and there's no way to create a permanent save mid-dungeon, only a temporary "suspend" save that you can come back to later, which deletes itself when you've accessed it. With a lot of reading (not least in the lengthy tutorial, which arguably goes into more detail than it has to), and with the game itself being aimed at a hardcore audience, this is a tough, if not insurmountable challenge, that's best suited for the older, more persistent players.

Although you'll spend a lot of time doing battles with enemies in Sorcery Saga, there's little for parents to worry about in terms of combat - there's no blood or gore, and weapons barely even make contact with the enemies, with baddies simply flashing when they take damage.

Parents may want to be aware that the game does feature a few minor innuendos, although again, there's nothing too serious here. Mostly revolving around a dark prince, who has his eyes on the lead Pupuru, our heroine isn't too keen on his advances ("He's really creeping me out! It's like he's eye-humping me!), while the prince himself has a tendency to get himself into trouble with the other girls ("You sick weirdo! She may look like a boy, but she's still a girl! How dare you act like an animal towards her?! *Gasp* Or could it be that you are only attracted to little-?!).

The game also features several women with impossibly large chests, and impossibly low-cut tops. About as strong as the dialogue ever gets, though, is when one character talks about her "cleavage getting all sweaty when it's hot")

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: PS Vita