Death by Scrolling Review – WGB

Ron Gilbert returned last year with an interesting little indie title that has now made the jump to consoles. Death By Scrolling isn’t your usual manly fare, however, tossing aside point and click puzzle solving for rogue-like mechanics and auto-attacks. It’s cute, has a slightly cozy vibe and incorporates a cool concept, but it’s hard to stay interested.

The afterlife is a promised land, but you’re stuck in purgatory with an evil reaper who is determined to ruin your day even more. The goal here is not to defeat death by fighting with one fist; it is to collect enough gold to pay the ferryman to the afterlife. Just run to the top, grab as many coins as you can, whether they are on the ground, in bags, or hidden in treasure chests. If monsters get in the way, avoid them or put them at range so that your auto-attacks can finish some of the violence.

There’s a catch, though: each time you successfully escape with six coins, the price of the ride goes up, so you’ll need to keep moving forward to collect the gold. Inflation is a bad thing, and even purgatory is not immune to its evils. 7,500 gold for the last ride? Well, now there is even 10k left my child. Now pay or stay stuck.

Death By Scrolling’s main gimmick is a very cool concept: the camera always faces slightly north, scrolling up through the pixelated landscape, matching the wall of flame at the bottom of the screen. Get too close to the scrolling doom and your run is over, so you need to move on and reach the next camp to restock, take a breath and jump into the next portal.

It almost makes the inclusion of Death Chase you—a concept we’ve seen in a few games like this—feel absurd, like putting a cherry on top of a cherry. He’ll end your life with one swipe of his scythe, but it’s mostly a distraction as he easily escapes. Well, unless the game just puts him in the worst place on the map, or decides he’s going to be super fast for some reason. But on the flipside, he can be easily slowed down with ranged attacks or avoided by letting him get stuck in an obstacle. Nothing can stop death, except a fence. Or a small warehouse. Sometimes even a few trees.

I talked about the camp. These are your safe places, temporary breaks to catch your breath. Not that this is a depressing game, mind you. It’s cool. The screen may be constantly scrolling, but unless you’re really paying attention, you’ll be able to get away from it pretty easily. I only died scrolling a few times—some were from being mobbed.

Anyway, the camp gives you three random cards to choose from that give you a little power up until you die. Also, there is an NPC that will have lost an important item that you can return for bonus gold, and a Gem shop where you can buy permanent upgrades. And, of course, the Ferryman is waiting, should you manage to collect enough gold to pay the toll.

This is the type of game where you’re meant to run after run after run, slowly getting a little further each time. Overall progression is handled by collecting Gems throughout the run, then spending them on cards that give permanent boosts. Simple stuff—maybe a melee range upgrade card here, more health, bigger pickup range. It’s boring again. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It works, but we’ve seen it many times, and the upgrades are stat boosts without anything exciting to be found anywhere.

And therein lies the big problem: once you get past the gimmick, everything else is normal. After just a few runs, you’ve seen the game and what it has to offer. It’s probably deeply unfair to draw comparisons to the likes of Hades 2, which is constantly adding new features, but that thought kept floating around in my head. In fact, it’s close to Devil Jam, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, both of which have the same problem of not having enough variety.

As you pick up gold like a kleptomaniac hoover, you’ll need to scour the map for weapons and power-ups. There are bows, swords, rocket launchers and more to find, as well as other useful items like damage absorption, the ability to walk on water, and the ability to fire multiple projectiles. All of these things don’t last long, though—weapons have a limited use before breaking, and power-ups often use a timer. So you’ll need to swap every so often for all the short 2-4 minute levels.

It’s a method that means you don’t do what you usually do in other examples of the genre. You don’t combine cool structures, very powerful compounds. Sure, there are power-ups and weapons that work together better than others, but you won’t have them for long. This means that runs tend to blur together. In games like Vampire Survivors, Brotato and Hades, it’s common to rush through one hell of a standout plot, but Death By Scrolling doesn’t conjure up those memories.

There are balance issues that left me annoyed, too. I hit a wall where I had successfully saved two easy characters and now I need 10,000g for each cross. At this point, the game seemed to really ramp up the difficulty, especially in camps 6–8, where the enemy damage output became interesting, the Reaper seemed to be able to catch me much faster than before, and I was struggling. Gem grind was fully functional, so getting any improvements that made a real, tangible difference took years. Compared to other games of this genre, where it always feels like you’re making at least some progress, Death By Scrolling sometimes leaves you empty-handed.

Then there are a few technical matters to discuss. Medals are currently released on PlayStation. Some do not calculate correctly; for completing level 9 will not unlock, etc. These will probably be patched soon enough, though.

Replicating basic games like Death By Scrolling built on top of it. Repeat and repeat and repeat. The trick is to make those repetitions fun by continuing to play solid gameplay, but in those ways, Death By Scrolling doesn’t hit the mark. The progression is basic and boring, and the game doesn’t support the tons and tons of gameplay it wants you to do.

But… there’s a simplicity to it that works. This is a pretty cool game compared to others with thousands of enemies and chaos. You make split second decisions, sure, but it’s all cozy and comfortable. So if that’s what you’re looking for, maybe Death By Scrolling is worth a look, especially since it costs about the same as a Starbucks coffee. If not, there are plenty of other games in this style that are better.