As retro adventures go, Dark Scrolls is about as pared back and straightforward as they come. Portland, Oregon developers doinksoft – known for Gunbrella and Gato Roboto – have crafted a challenging and addictive experience, albeit one with some notably rough edges.
In many respects, Dark Scrolls looks and plays like a platformer from the late 1980s or early 1990s and the core experience could hardly be simpler or more classic. At the outset, three characters are selectable – the time-honoured trio of barbarian, rogue, and mage. Having chosen a hero, the player must guide them through several fairly brief stages, each of which climaxes with a boss encounter.
Given the simplicity of Dark Scrolls, variety is critical to sustain interest and thankfully doinksoft have done enough in this respect. Each iteration of a stage is built up from a procedural arrangement of pre-built segments. This system generally works well, although occasionally there are lulls, transitional areas with few or any foes, which slow down the side-scrolling action.
Stages become increasingly rife with traps and other hazards
Slain enemies – be they zombies, hopping frogs, or hostile jellies, for example – drop coins. At the midpoint of each stage the player can visit a shop operated by a kindly merchant and heralded by his pet goose (“honk!”). This is where the core hook of Dark Scrolls comes in. Abilities purchased from the merchant are assigned to a star rank, from zero to five. These passive powers then trigger automatically when the player hits that rank; ranks are reached by defeating enemies.
Crucially, reaching five stars allows the player to manually trigger a special power, unique to each of the nine characters that can eventually be unlocked. Grizz the barbarian, for example, can launch axes in a wide circle around himself. Emrys the mage surrounds himself with orbiting spells, which hit enemies and destroy incoming projectiles. By dealing damage and increasing star rank fast enough, players can cause passive perks to stack, and this is essential to dealing serious damage and bringing down bosses.
It’s a simple but clever system, aligned to a form of meta-progression. At the end of each run, “meta-crystals” are earned. These can be spent in another shop back at camp, to unlock new perks for future runs. As the roster of perks and characters gradually expands, it becomes possible to set up formidable new builds, which will be needed to push further into the game.
The barbarian’s formidable throwing axes fly in a deadly arc
There are issues, however. One of the biggest is that doinksoft neglects to explain how any of this works. For example, trinkets are passive bonuses that are earned during runs but it isn’t at all obvious what they do. The methods to unlock the six additional characters are also mostly opaque, and often highly grindy and difficult. The easiest to acquire is Biscuit the dog, who is frustratingly weak and amounts to a much higher difficulty mode. His special ability seems almost broken – while his “scary bark” freezes enemies on screen, it does so for a tiny amount of time, half of which is wasted by being forced to jump at the critical moment.
There are other concerns. Pigeon the rogue can enter a stealth state, and then throw a dagger that is guaranteed to do critical damage. In practice, this is only really useful against bosses, partly because it is so easy to miss the shot and waste the special altogether. Emrys’ projectile attack synergises very well with perks which split or accelerate his shots, but this fills much of the screen in a way which severely compromises visibility. In general he is by far and away the strongest of the starting characters.
While it suffers with some bugs and curious design decisions, Dark Scrolls is a lovingly hand-crafted game with a great deal of charm in its pixel art and music. While simple in a number of respects, it has greater depth than is apparent at first and it strongly rewards persistence and exploration.
