Scourgebringer approaches game design with a scrupulous, or maybe an agnostic puritanism, distaste for elements that are non-combinatronic or against stream in their play matching. The entirety of the skill tree, navigated in the 20 second intervals taken between the game’s 10 minute runs, consists of quilting together elements, which already had interaction across several matrices, further and further into tighter and tighter knit. By the time Scourgebringer runs extend consistently into the final area, extending the initial dives of 2 minutes dashes to 15 minute sprints, every action, every element of the playspace, will engage the player with a mechanical statement that has another verb parenthetically communicated within it: your double jump keeps you off the ground, extending your ‘don’t touch the floor’ damage bonus for the room, which resets your dash, which has within it a smash reflection, which kills an enemy, increasing a different ‘enemies killed within getting hit’ damage bonus, which resets smash, jump, and dash in one button press. It is airtight; it is suffocating; it becomes very boring.
I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.
The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.
Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.
That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.
This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.
Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.
I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.
The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.
Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.
That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.
This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.
Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.
Lacks much variety for its genre, but that allows Scourgebringer to craft the most challenging yet fair roguelike experience with an insane killer "DOOM" soundtrack to match the intensity of the gameplay and some of the tightest 2D gameplay.
Its precise movement is often compared to Celeste, but an equally strong example is to Furi with how each basic move affords so many different options. Your firearm reloads by dealing melee damage to enemies, so you have to mix it into your melee combos strategically. Your dash has no i-frames but it resets on enemy kill, and drags enemies along with you. Your heavy attack isn't just an aoe, but it stuns almost all enemies, so you can combo it with the dash to corral enemies together. And yet by being risky and chasing enemies, you increase your survivability since hitting enemies resets your double jump too. Like Furi, all of these simple mechanics feed into encouraging you to play aggressively yet intelligently.
And you feel like a Gamer God
Its precise movement is often compared to Celeste, but an equally strong example is to Furi with how each basic move affords so many different options. Your firearm reloads by dealing melee damage to enemies, so you have to mix it into your melee combos strategically. Your dash has no i-frames but it resets on enemy kill, and drags enemies along with you. Your heavy attack isn't just an aoe, but it stuns almost all enemies, so you can combo it with the dash to corral enemies together. And yet by being risky and chasing enemies, you increase your survivability since hitting enemies resets your double jump too. Like Furi, all of these simple mechanics feed into encouraging you to play aggressively yet intelligently.
And you feel like a Gamer God
I’ll admit that I was unable to beat this game. It is hard and stingy with its healing items and I had too much pride to use the game’s beneficial accessibility options for aid lol.
This is a solid roguelite with light platforming and bullet hell elements. Combat is fast, fluid, and challenging, but the hit boxes are occasionally inconsistent, which lead to a few cheap shots. Also, for a game where you’ll die often, the amount of guns, mods, and upgrades was underwhelming. It made the game feel repetitive pretty fast.
Despite my failure, I enjoyed this game a lot. I was heartbroken by a few of my deaths, but even then I retried instantly. Definitely try this if you are a fan of roguelites or 2D action games in general.
This is a solid roguelite with light platforming and bullet hell elements. Combat is fast, fluid, and challenging, but the hit boxes are occasionally inconsistent, which lead to a few cheap shots. Also, for a game where you’ll die often, the amount of guns, mods, and upgrades was underwhelming. It made the game feel repetitive pretty fast.
Despite my failure, I enjoyed this game a lot. I was heartbroken by a few of my deaths, but even then I retried instantly. Definitely try this if you are a fan of roguelites or 2D action games in general.
raw?
Super snappy and fun, it's very hard but it just works super well and runs on a laptop. The music can get repetitive but it's hella fun. If you want a brutal but fun roguelite, it's a game worth considering.
Only problem is there isn't more of it
By that I mean there is only one of each floor-boss so once you've mastered them it gets a bit boring doing it over and over.
By that I mean there is only one of each floor-boss so once you've mastered them it gets a bit boring doing it over and over.
O principal ponto forte do jogo é o combate (já que basicamente ele só tem isso), com uma mecânica legal de alternar ataques corpo a corpo com ataques a distância e uma combate extremamente rápido (pessoalmente um dos ou talvez até o mais rápido que eu já vi em um jogo), o que de primeira me prendeu muito nesse jogo, me deixando com o pensamento de que esse seria o melhor jogo que ja joguei por muito tempo.
Infelizmente com o passar do tempo percebi algumas coisas que me incomodaram muito, como uma trilha sonora bem chata e repetitiva, que chega a incomodar depois de um tempo, história muito fraca e que não da vontade de ir atrás, fases constituídas por basicamente 3 inimigos diferentes, o que torna extremamente repetitivo e o fato de não existir uma variedade para armas corpo a corpo, somente a inicial, outro fato que torna o jogo muito repetitivo.
Além disso, a árvore de habilidades tem uma péssima distribuição das habilidades, que por sua vez são muito inúteis na maioria das vezes.
Apesar de tantas falhas, o combate extremamente acelerado do jogo me pegou muito e acerta em alguns momentos, sendo um bom jogo para jogar de vez em quando, mas não para investir tanto tempo e jogar por horas seguidas, já que é um jogo cansativo
Infelizmente com o passar do tempo percebi algumas coisas que me incomodaram muito, como uma trilha sonora bem chata e repetitiva, que chega a incomodar depois de um tempo, história muito fraca e que não da vontade de ir atrás, fases constituídas por basicamente 3 inimigos diferentes, o que torna extremamente repetitivo e o fato de não existir uma variedade para armas corpo a corpo, somente a inicial, outro fato que torna o jogo muito repetitivo.
Além disso, a árvore de habilidades tem uma péssima distribuição das habilidades, que por sua vez são muito inúteis na maioria das vezes.
Apesar de tantas falhas, o combate extremamente acelerado do jogo me pegou muito e acerta em alguns momentos, sendo um bom jogo para jogar de vez em quando, mas não para investir tanto tempo e jogar por horas seguidas, já que é um jogo cansativo
This is a very run rouge lite, it has some interesting upgrades that can make things go easier (and sometimes harder) on each playthrough. I really liked the permanent upgrade system and how it works out (also love the idea that its based on the tree on the main screen).
I'm just so bad at these games that I can't find myself to get to the end everytime I play, and it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress or learning too much on the why...except for the bosses, they feel great to beat once you figure out the patterns of their attacks.
I also love the pixel graphics here, so crisp and very nice on the eyes!
I'm just so bad at these games that I can't find myself to get to the end everytime I play, and it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress or learning too much on the why...except for the bosses, they feel great to beat once you figure out the patterns of their attacks.
I also love the pixel graphics here, so crisp and very nice on the eyes!
Es muy rápido y de acción pura. Si estas tocando el suelo, algo mal estás haciendo. O eso debería ser, pero hay enemigos que es mucho mejor sentarte a esperar a que se acerquen o a que hagan su ataque y luego si eso ya vas tú a matarlos. Además, es un juego difícil (lo cual está genial), pero no tiene demasiados enemigos, cansándote de matar siempre a los mismos, así como a los mismos bosses una y otra vez. Las mejoras del árbol, algunas son clave para poder jugar (no entendiendo como no vienen de base), mientras que otras son super anecdóticas.
Lo considero un buen juego, pero el ritmo es irregular como poco, variando entre frenética acción y boss/enemigo de ascensor. Además, los enemigos quizás tengan un pelín de vida, pudiendo estar genial una mejora de que a más desbloquees el árbol menos vida tienen, estando menos tiempo en los primeros niveles, de los cuales te vas a hartar.
Digo muchas cosas negativas, pero que el juego está bien. Quizás no para acabarlo porque se puede hacer bola, pero cada vez que lo quitaba tenía ganas de echar una run, sobre todo por lo ágiles que son todos los menús.
Lo considero un buen juego, pero el ritmo es irregular como poco, variando entre frenética acción y boss/enemigo de ascensor. Además, los enemigos quizás tengan un pelín de vida, pudiendo estar genial una mejora de que a más desbloquees el árbol menos vida tienen, estando menos tiempo en los primeros niveles, de los cuales te vas a hartar.
Digo muchas cosas negativas, pero que el juego está bien. Quizás no para acabarlo porque se puede hacer bola, pero cada vez que lo quitaba tenía ganas de echar una run, sobre todo por lo ágiles que son todos los menús.
Very well made well designed and fun, but it does get old and really doesnt have enough variety, still a good lil time tho
Un gameplay ultra nerveux accompagné d'une ost épique qui nous pousse a chercher le risque, la vitesse, l'agressivité. Trop peu de variation dans le gameplay pour un roguelike.
The ScourgeBringer Says: the combat system feels very intuitive for a room-to-room roguelite. parrying is the best part
Gameplay is very fast paced and feels great. Would recommend for action seekers and rougelike enjoyers alike
Good but slightly too many meta progression stuff