Roguelite games aren’t the new kid on the block anymore. It’s been almost two decades since Spelunky effectively coined the genre and spawned a thousand offshoots looking to leave their own unique mark. Death by Scrolling is one of these attempts, a roguelite with its own little spin on the formula enticing players to spend hour after hour trying to climb the ladder.
Set in a bureaucratic, pointedly capitalist version of Purgatory, Death by Scrolling doesn’t re-invent the wheel. Its structure is a familiar one: survive stage after stage full of enemies hell-bent on resetting your progress, collecting temporary weapons and upgrades to help you along your way. In-between areas, you can spend gems to gain permanent upgrades which stick with you between runs, making each subsequent attempt that tiny bit easier. Your ultimate goal is to collect enough gold – a temporary currency which also resets each run – to pay the Ferryman and escape the looping nightmare of the game world.
The game’s unique twist to the formula is, of all things, the camera. The screen is constantly forcing you to move upwards; there’s no time to stand still, and very little time to think about your next move. It’s a simple idea, but one which goes a long way to making a good first impression. Later on, when you start to tackle side quests offered to you by NPCs in the rest areas between stages, this mechanic reaffirms its impact on the gameplay loop. Taking time to chase after a lost item while you’re being chased by enemies as well as the ever-approaching wall of death creeping up your screen can often mean the difference between a successful run and being sent straight back to the beginning – especially when Death by Scrolling’s deadliest enemy, the Reaper, decides to show up unannounced.
The mechanic serves as a strong hook. Unfortunately, when it wears off, you start to notice cracks in the wall a fancy new paint job was covering up. On paper, there are plenty of upgrades to keep you invested in progression and attempting “one more” run. In practice, the only upgrades which meaningfully changed my experience were the temporary ones. Weapons and in-the-moment modifiers which expired after a certain amount of time or numbers of uses allowed me to attempt different play styles or risk death for gems; the permanent upgrades, however, quickly blurred together into underlying mechanics, with nothing standing out. Damage goes up. Walking speed increases. Upgrade choices stop feeling exciting much faster than they should, and feel like noise as a result.
NPC dialogue in rest areas is funny and doesn’t overstay its welcome, but at the same time, that same simplicity – and its repetition – left me wanting just a little bit more. The game is attempting to parody capitalist number-crunching, but doesn’t go anywhere with that idea beyond a line or two of (admittedly funny) lip service. The enemies appear the have variety at first, until you realise that the variety in their attacks essentially boil down to the same four or five patterns or styles. This makes sense – nothing can be too complex, since the player is never given time to stand still – but you feel it before you notice it. And the feeling is a bit disappointing.
The end result is a roguelite where build variety, which is a staple of why players want to attempt run after run in the first place, is severely limited; but even if it weren’t, a lack of enemy variety means it probably wouldn’t matter in the first place. This would be fine for any indie game, but Death by Scrolling seems dead-set on wanting you to play as many runs as possible. On Xbox, where I played the game, certain achievements ask you to complete individual worlds 200, 300, or even 500 times.
Runs start feeling identical much, much earlier than that, which is a shame. The tragedy of Death by Scrolling is that its best idea arrives in the first ten minutes. While the game remains enjoyable, it rarely introduces upgrades, enemies, or mechanics which expand upon the initial concept. Death by Scrolling is at its best when you’re learning its systems and adapting to the constant pressure of its central mechanic. After that – well, it just feels a bit like Purgatory.
