Dark Scrolls Review: A Sluggish Arcade Stumble into Entropy

I was excited to get going with Dark Scrolls, Doinksoft’s new release under Devolver Digital, a 2D co-op fantasy shmup platformer that looked dynamite in trailers. I now sense a distinct miscalculation at its core, evident in its discordant design, wobbly economy, and scarcity of clearly defined objectives.

There’s an approachably anarchic doujin soft quality to Dark Scrolls, which garners it some appeal, along with an eccentric grab bag of playable heroes, but even a bare bones arcade experience deserves a tangible sense of reward.

Doinksoft’s library includes 1-bit metroidvania Gato Roboto and Gunbrella, a moody action-RPG platformer with a distinctly dark narrative and a fun titular weapon to wield. Dark Scrolls borrows minimally from this catalog aside from its retro-styled presentation, leaving a scatterbrained platformer with allusions to co-op that never finds its footing, no matter how many funky characters you unlock.

A Barbarian, A Rogue, and A Mage Walk Into a Bar

There are three to start with: a barbarian named Grizz, Pigeon the rogue, and Emerys, a mage reminiscent of Vivi from Final Fantasy IX. The pregame intro tells what little story Dark Scrolls can muster, how this trio is recruited by an unnamed knight to slay a three-headed dragon and retrieve a relic, but the knight betrayed the party…so, now they are going back to re-kill the dragon and collect it again, somehow?

This threadbare premise never makes sense and Dark Scrolls casually hand-waves any inclination to grander context. Why is the hub’s shopkeeper three geese in a trenchcoat? What happens after all the dark scrolls are collected and the true evil is bested? Is the world saved? Why is there a time loop in the first place?

Game logic for its own sake is a valid approach, but Dark Scrolls’ mechanics, economy, and finer details often left me wanting. Defeating a level boss or the final encounter doesn’t conjure so much as a game over or detailed scoring screen. I kept expecting something else to happen on the next clear, rather than just unceremoniously dumping my partner and I back into the lobby after it was over and we "won."

All-Powerful Perks and Quirks

There’s a pun hidden in the title, as Dark Scrolls plays out as an autoscroller, with the screen slowly inching and revealing the next generated level chunk with its spawning enemies and traps. Each hero utilizes a rapid-fire projectile, a special, and double-jump, but the game’s perks system bears better explanation. Five stars in your HUD fill up as you damage mobs, and you can purchase perks from a shop in each level that slot into each numbered star. Then, when you proc one, the related perk will activate on a nine-second timer.

With consistent damage, you'll regularly activate multiple perks in a row, and trigging a hero's special on five stars resets them, letting you loop through perks once again. Strategically selecting and positioning synergizing perks leads to you steamrolling mobs and bosses, dependent on the perk options you encounter and/or can afford in each level.

Beyond that, most double-jumps afford judicious i-frames, arguably more impactful than specials and always free to use. Grizz is short on jump distance but stomps enemies, Emerys performs an M.Bison-like dash-attack or drills upward into the sky, and Pigeon tosses daggers beneath their feet. Learning the timing and i-frame potential of each hero offers Dark Scrolls’ most compelling gameplay hook, and the seven additional heroes feature their own interesting quirks, including flight, aura buffs, and even a magical saxophone with detailed songs to memorize.

All that said, the game’s perks system is poorly explained, like most aspects of Dark Scrolls. Metaprogression gems are garnered on a win or loss and can unlock perks for purchase, but a handful are of minimal value and will invariably poison the pool. Otherwise, you can spend gems on equippable emotes, but get this: none are unique to the game, but simply standardized emojis rendered in pixel form, which seems bizarrely unimaginative for a premium unlock irrelevant to gameplay.

There are no save slots, so you'd presumably need to dig into your file system to delete the game’s save data to start out fresh with a blank slate of perks. Each level offers a perk shop before its boss and, if you're anything like me, you’ll find yourself cursing the decision to unlock haste, the coin fairy, and the rocket jump.

Speaking of merchants and pacing, each autoscrolling stage includes a challenge room and a shop, always in that order. Levels do variate with alternate layouts between them, but there aren’t many, and the peak reward for besting a challenge room produces a cannon that skips the next section of gameplay and shoots you directly into the shop ahead. It’s a strangely unsatisfying boon, and you'll quickly learn that it results in less gold, so you'll rarely ever use it.

Break Dark Scrolls' Economy With One Simple Trick

That’s most of what predictably functions in Dark Scrolls, but there are many imprecise elements besides. You can bash on a punching bag in the singleplayer training area while grabbing a collection of spawning perks; drawing a coin-boosting perk for this room enables you to cheat and collect gold by the thousands for your next run.

Maybe that’s a secret and intentional trick? Consider, then, that when unlocking duplicate emotes in the hub, the game promises to cash them in for 500 gold apiece…except it doesn’t do this at all. It tells you that it does, but this gold is never retained, rendering it a complete waste of your slow-to-amass gems.

One unlock condition for a character involves a prison key item from the shop to be brought over to the castle stage, except the price for this item is never visible onscreen. From my testing, the key cost seems to increase dependent on the level it was purchased, but I have no idea of its numeric value, and was convinced it was a glitch until I finally obtained it for an untold sum during a run.

When a partner dies in co-op, they become a flying ghost who can collect dropped hearts during a level, implying that this will eventually allow them to resurrect. However, there is no resurrection mechanic unless the remaining player beats the level and ghosts cannot damage enemies, so you might as well put the controller down if you die early. This genuin

No Score and No Lore

I’ve unlocked every character and so-called "ending" in Dark Scrolls to no avail or interest. I don’t think I expected more than the game promised; to compare, Tribute’s underplayed 2015 gem Curses ‘N Chaos struggled to find an audience for its single-screen co-op score-attack concept, but Dark Scrolls lacks adjustable challenge or even score-tracking, which leaves little depth to explore.

Dark Scrolls isn’t harder with two players other than the fact that gold isn't shared, with even challenge rooms and boss HP unaffected, and there isn’t a single co-op mechanical twist I could discern in this ostensibly co-op-oriented game. The greatest challenge I encountered with a friend was an optional map path gated by 1200 gold each time, an uninspired chore which required that one of us avoid collecting gold on the way.

Basic audio settings cannot be accessed mid-run and there’s no way to adjust controller input in Dark Scrolls, even via the title screen. There’s not a single accessibility option, no list of previous runs or unlocked perks to keep tabs on, no online leaderboards to climb, leaving nothing to regret, review, or, react to at all.

Dark Scrolls feels like an interrupted project at best. Each character sprite contains minimal frames of animation, including the game's simplistic pushover bosses. Unlocking all ten heroes grants some decent variety at the start, but there’s no special reward for completing the game with any one or two of them.

It’s rare for even a subpar game to not liven up with the addition of co-op, evident in the vast assortment of friendslop titles of varying quality clogging up Steam in recent years. Yet Dark Scrolls isn’t any better and, potentially, marginally worse with a partner, and I struggle to imagine how co-op play factored into its original development; you apparently can’t even unlock new heroes when playing with a friend.

A simple, competent shmup can be a beautiful thing, a collection of different heroes to unlock an easy hook. It isn't that Dark Scrolls lacks outright complexity, with multiple paths through the short game, nuance between characters, and some secret mini-quests to round out its content. But it barely acknowledges success or failure, never challenges you after the first few hours, and can't devise a reward or goal to spur you on after you've seen what little it has to offer. If Dark Scrolls were an arcade cabinet back in the day, a few quarters would be enough to send you off to the next one.