Death by Scrolling is a fast-paced roguelike experience that demands smart movement, keeping cool in the face of hectic screenfuls of visual information and making on-the-fly build decisions. This loop is fleshed out with 5 playable characters who each have their own loot pools, special power ups and passive abilities — all while sharing a Destiny Card meta-progression system on top. So why is it so dull?
Death by Scrolling thrusts you, tutorial-less, into a vertically scrolling hell. Well, technically it’s a vertically-scrolling purgatory, but I don’t think our starting character Jacklyn really cares for the difference. You get two starting weapons to choose from by simply running into them, and then paths are presented and enemies spawned in to create constant risk/reward scenarios.
The bottom of the screen is a fiery inferno creeping towards you through an idyllic forest, making the beautiful pixel art a backdrop for a much more brutal gameplay loop. By running, grabbing gold and swapping item / power-up cards on-the-fly you fight for survival one level at a time. At the end of each stint is a camp which can provide permanent upgrades, run-specific upgrades and replacement weapon or power-up cards.
Since you can only carry one weapon and one of each type of power-up, planning your movement is vital. Running half a screen to grab a Water Walking card so that you can quickly bypass a difficult upcoming segment can pay off if you’re on low health, but if the bottom of the screen is particularly close you might be too far from the card to make it in time…
Weapons have limited uses and interacting with items like wells (which spawn gold for as long as you’re next to them) become split-second calculations of how long it’ll take to walk there and how long it’ll take to get to a way forward afterwards. If your weapon runs out of uses you’re left with a damageless punch that is only good to stun one enemy at a time, so management under pressure is the name of the game.
A frantic sprint on paper — A tedious trudge in practice
Every facet of that overview sounds like a delightful (albeit difficult) game is in store, but in practice almost every single aspect is too flawed to really actualise its own potential. Under the tedium and invasive design choices there is a gem of a game, but you need to really like what’s here to look past the stack of minor grievances.
Combat and killing is never worth it
It didn’t take me many runs to realise that enemies are distractions and combat is a bait. The only metric that matters is your gold total, with 5000 allowing victory at the next camp. Your HP resets each level and gems can only be used for underwhelming upgrades. Enemies do drop gold, of course, but when there’s a few hundred on the ground and between 750 – 2500 available from quest items, killing enemies for gold is simply not important. Weapon usage being limited means you need to prioritise them for self-defence or carving a path onwards, not sticking around to kill everything for gold drops.
Then, in terms of actual gameplay, combat is a bit too much of a numbers game. If you don’t have enough uses of your weapon or enough damage power-ups then you need to just avoid all enemies. Then, because there’s no manual aiming or attacking, weapon uses get wasted either way. This is particularly egregious with ranged weapons, which will pile all their uses into Death (Who is immune to damage) leaving you with nothing for the killable mobs.
Balancing quirky with annoying
The social feed when you die is a quirky way to provide some summary and commentary on the run, but the fact that each message has an audio cue and they don’t stop is an oversight. I don’t know about you but if I’ve got constant notification noises in my ear when I’m looking at a stats screen, those stats aren’t getting taken in. I’m not sure why the messages don’t just stop once the screen is full, providing a balance of being quirky without being annoying. You can completely disable the feed, but that seems like a non-solution to a problem that could simply not exist by capping the number of messages to 6 or so.
UI design that would make Balatro blush
It took me a few runs to turn on “HUD on Bottom” — I genuinely can’t foresee a situation where you wouldn’t want this enabled. The entire game scrolls from the top, so to get visual information on upcoming enemies or obstacles as efficiently as possible you really don’t want the top of the screen covered by HUD. Since you categorically cannot go backwards, as the screen keeps scrolling up regardless of your movement, why is HUD on bottom not the default?
Death by Scrolling clearly wants to create a chaotic and frantic game screen to enhance the stress and adrenaline of making those split-second decisions, but even in a deliberately chaotic system the player needs certain information to be clear and easy to follow. Things like dealing and taking damage, for example…
Communication of damage is done through text-based popups. In the same way a sensible game might have damage numbers, or a visual of a heart icon with a single number, Death By Scrolling instead decides to have popups that say “+2 Hearts Damage” or “+ 1 1/2 Heart Damage” for every single instance of inflicted pain on enemies. For damage on the player it’s “-1 Heart Damage”…
The screen gets full of text that you simply don’t have time to process. I’m not sure if it’s laid out all as text for a particular reason, but it made me appreciate how designing a simple, communicative UI must not be as easy as it seems.
Huge amounts of roguelike variety…locked behind tedious objectives
The game shows off all the variety and interest that a roguelike is fueled by only after you finish a run with the first character — which at time of writing just 9% of players on Steam have done. If only 9% of your players have seen that your game has variety, you need to up the unlock rate of your roguelike.
After you settle the first character into the Afterlife you are given a fresh soul to sprint through Purgatory with. Skylar, the second playable character, is a bow specialist and fires them faster. However, what the game doesn’t tell you is that her pickups, from weapons to power ups, are entirely different from Jacklyn’s!
So that’s five characters, each with their own loot and power-up pool. This means runs can play vastly differently. The unfortunate caveat is that all that content is locked behind getting the previous character unlocked. The challenges are fixed per character and can’t be bypassed by saving up gems (Which, let’s be honest, aren’t exactly exciting to use for Destiny Cards anyway…).
The only gameplay variety and progression you have access to until then is the Destiny Card shop. Unfortunately, it’s underbaked and underwhelming compared to the unique premise and style of everything else. Destiny Cards vary between 5% buffs and simple extra hearts. It’s fine, it’s serviceable, but some more engaging permanent progression would have been enough to make me care about gems more, creating even more decisions as I play: “Do I rush to this dangerous trapped area for gems or take the safer path?”.
A strong core premise with great ability variety that is never allowed to truly shine
It’s a shame that Death By Scrolling just couldn’t hook me. The premise is grand, the character variety is great on paper and the constant decision-making really makes you pay attention to what you’re doing every single second that passes. But, with such strict rules for weapon attacks, quest gold being the only viable source to reach 5k and a progression system that isn’t punchy enough in the early hours I was feeling burnt-out by the time I actually got to that meat on the bone.
A game like Megabonk, drowning the player with character choices and map choices and modifier choices can be overwhelming. But, a player always has the option to ignore all those unlocks and just press play. In Death by Scrolling you don’t have a choice. You’re stuck in the slow lane without the option to explore the breadth of the content the game has until you’ve done your chores. It’s unfortunate that such a fun loop and wealth of content is buried under tedium, red tape, and huge “+1 ½ Heart Damage” popups…
Death By Scrolling is available on Steam
