I believe a single cursed hit is rolling your damage twice and taking the lesser value, the opposite of a lucky hit.

But it could be the opposite of a crushing blow where it takes the minimum damage value.

I haven't looked closely at the damage numbers when I've been cursed.

And from Ayk below:

Originally posted by Ayk-:

Cursed hit is the least of the penalties when it comes to curse.
The biggest downside is that curse has the potential to mess up with room rewards, such as turning your +3 dex reward to +1, and spawn random mini-boss type creatures when you go inside a new room, odds of these two happening increase with each curse stack.

as he said ^
you wanna minimise curse on slow, high burst builds. it isnt as debilitating on faster weapons with lower dmg scaling

There's a couple more effects of curse, but they have the big obvious skull and unique sound effect so they'll be obvious.

The game could do a better job of explaining certain mechanics and providing a more comprehensive stat screen.

Thanks for the replies ppl!

Originally posted by Nogan:

The game could do a better job of explaining certain mechanics and providing a more comprehensive stat screen.

Agreed!
Even thou the author seemingly did a really great job on expanding the numbers on popup extras and screens... Before it was much more cryptic!
Curse is still sort of a mystery, and the DPS screen seems to not take it into account too...

Cursed hit is the least of the penalties when it comes to curse.
The biggest downside is that curse has the potential to mess up with room rewards, such as turning your +3 dex reward to +1, and spawn random mini-boss type creatures when you go inside a new room, odds of these two happening increase with each curse stack.

Originally posted by Acubens:

Thanks for the replies ppl!

Originally posted by Nogan:

The game could do a better job of explaining certain mechanics and providing a more comprehensive stat screen.

Agreed!
Even thou the author seemingly did a really great job on expanding the numbers on popup extras and screens... Before it was much more cryptic!
Curse is still sort of a mystery, and the DPS screen seems to not take it into account too...

there is a setting you can enable to always show detailed information about things

Originally posted by Ayk-:

Cursed hit is the least of the penalties when it comes to curse.
The biggest downside is that curse has the potential to mess up with room rewards, such as turning your +3 dex reward to +1, and spawn random mini-boss type creatures when you go inside a new room, odds of these two happening increase with each curse stack.

Adding this to my comment with the quotes from you, cursed hit is only one aspect of the curse, for some reason I got hung up on that, probably because it's the stat that most affects the weapon