Past Cure Receives "Relaunch" with v2 Patch

A new patch for Phantom 8's Past Cure, available now on PC and in the coming weeks for PlayStation 4 and XBox One, has added a host of new content to the game including new story elements, new game mechanics, and improved graphics. The patch comes amidst rather heavy criticisms for the highly-anticipated horror game with Phantom 8 hoping this "relaunch" will legitimize their debut game.

For those of you who don't know, Past Cure is a horror game that released in February. Since then, it has been thoroughly rounded out by players, including Game Grin's own Christian Wooton in his review of the game. It is currently sitting at a mere 30% positive rating on Steam with reviews panning it for it poor optimization, horrendous voice acting, and aimless storytelling and gameplay. The stealth in particular seems to be a big miss with the fans.

"We were astounded by the level of feedback the community offered. The response to Past Cure has been incredible, and for a small studio, we’ve been really humbled by the positive contribution fans have made,” said Simon Gerdesmann, Phantom 8’s Managing Director. “We also listened to the things that didn’t resonate as we would have hoped, and have made a swathe of changes, additions, enhancements, redesigns to really bring out the best in Past Cure, a true labour of love for us.”

A rather hefty dev diary details the issues the devs addressed with this new version. There's a lot to unpack and you can read it here  (potential spoilers), but a lot of the improvements seem aimed at making the game flow better by improving the maps, overall gameplay (particularly the stealth system), enemy AI, the sanity mechanics, and tweaking the powers, including the addition of a new "mind bash" ability.

As stated before, now with even more limited resources, we wanted to redeem some parts of Past Cure with efficiency in mind, trying to make decisions that does more impact to the game for the time and manpower we have. It is a fair wish if we could change more but this is not always possible, especially when a change can impact a lot other areas. As always, we would like to hear your opinions, especially the ones comparing it to the previous version of the game so we can evaluate ourselves if we made correct decisions and correct executions of them.

 It's a fairly robust list of changes and it's clear Phantom 8 is taking players' criticisms to heart. Of course, it remains to be seen whether their efforts will cure all of Past Cure's ills.