Dark Scrolls Review – Keep scrollin’, scrollin’, scrollin’

If there’s one thing that doinksoft and Devolver Digital have, it’s gumption. Dark Scrolls is a game with fantastic wordplay for the title, since it’s really got nothing to do with FromSoftware or Dark Souls at all. No, Dark Scrolls is a fantasy arcade game that takes a lot from the shoot ’em up genre more than anywhere else, with some classic 8-bit platforming thrown-in for good measure. You choose a character at the beginning of each run, and then you, your unique double jump ability, and your basic attack, set out to try and get through a run while the world constantly scrolls from left to right.

Complexity in games is a bit of an oddity because there are so many ways to use it as a developer. You can have complexity in level design, for example, where the biggest challenge is finding your way around. Complexity of gameplay, in terms of combos and button presses, which tends to be where I find the most joy, especially if you can make different builds and lean into different strategies and play styles. Dark Scrolls is a game where the complexity mostly comes from paying attention to what’s going on on the screen, and I don’t know that I love it.

A lot of the draw here is likely going to be the nostalgia factor. Dark Scrolls looks like Ghosts and Goblins and a lot of other games from that era, and in a way, plays like one of them too thanks to the simplicity of the controls. If I had to pick a game that it’s most similar too, Cuphead would be one that leaps to mind, but this doesn’t have the same flair for the dramatic, nor is it as difficult.

You do get stronger during the runs, with you essentially gaining stars as you play to represent how well you’re doing, and you can purchase power-ups and set them to trigger at different star levels, setting your own level of reward. It’s a novel take on the roguelite power-up system, but without a lot of effort, it’s pretty tricky to manage anything other than full stars or no stars.

The other thing the game does that’s novel is that it is, as the name suggests, constantly scrolling, Outside of mini-bosses and bosses, the game is always on the move, meaning you have to be as well. If you remember the levels in older Mario games where that was the case, you’re on the right track. It adds a bit more urgency to the chaos, which I do like, but it’s not enough to grab my attention and not let go.

There is both online and offline co-op though, which certainly helps to make it more fun. After all, bouncing on your co-op buddy’s head to get more height (or just to annoy them) is one of those gaming joys that is older than time itself. We can safely assume cave men were doing this in the before times too.