With the trend of indies returning to the genres and times that inspired them, it’s become expected that most games releasing now with retro aesthetics adapt to contemporary game design. The term I’ve seen the most to describe this is “retro-inspired.”
Dark Scrolls follows the retro formula more closely. Much more closely.
In my play time with the game, I found myself wondering, maybe too often, if “retro-inspired” has any correlation with the quality of a game. If I were reviewing Dark Scrolls in the 90s, just how differently would I perceive its quality than now in 2026? I’m reminded of a friend of mine who commented on the transition in game design from arcade gaming to home consoles and how much of the quarter-feed cadence of gaming has hung around, especially in some specific genres.
There’s certainly been a shift in how game design entices a player to return and continue playing the game. Thankfully, we don’t need a jangling pocket of coins. Now it’s usually patience and attention. This idea, however, pairs nicely with difficulty scaling in games and how a video game measures not only progress but regression as well.
But before riding this tangent train to the ends of the Earth, I’ll circle back to the point that I want to function as the foundation of this review: Dark Scrolls is a simple game that recalls much older game design, but it made me feel that maybe it’s better to leave the past behind. There’s a beauty in riding horseback, but thank God for air conditioning in the modern vehicle. Largely how people respond to Dark Scrolls, I imagine, will depend on how much you are willing to come away sore and bow-legged from your first attempts rather than smoothly and intuitively adjusting to its game design. For many, it’ll feel like regression.
The developer behind Dark Scrolls, Doinksoft, has launched two other games with Devolver Digital as their publisher: Gato Roboto and Gunbrella (which you can snag for free with Dark Scrolls), and both are triumphs in their respective genres. Not having repeated themselves between their first two games, Doinksoft keeps the record going with a departure on the third, with only platforming as the carried-over characteristic.
Your only narrative exposition is given with a charming opening cutscene that runs before you see the title screen. A ragtag crew of disparate heroes set out to gather the fabled dark scrolls, and from there our story commences. Rather than feeling barebones, it’s bursting with opportunities for emergent narrative. Playing a few rounds with one of my kids, the light-hearted and general silliness translated well into shenanigans and our own storytelling as we ventured from run to run. Doinksoft has been clear in their marketing that Dark Scrolls’ biggest aim is to capture constant barbs, elbowing, and camaraderie from couch co-op games. While it’s successful in recapturing the spirit of no-school-tomorrow late nights, the age of some of its systems dragged like weights.
Your health bar appears generous and typically is, with enemies plinking a hit or two at a time, until it isn’t. Often the screen will be cluttered with enemies and projectiles, making it difficult to gauge where your character is. Enter a rogue bomb from a boss with a swarm of enemies, and that health bar depletes almost instantaneously. Enemies will drop heats with a relatively easy cadence, but the reshuffling rogue-like design may mean that you’ll simply be outmatched in a timed horde room. There was this constant whiplash of health that, beyond keeping me on my toes, never made me feel entirely in control.
Typically bad luck or the off chance of some serious imbalance in a run is countered with upgrades. Well, Dark Scrolls offers very little. There’s no real metaprogressive system. You can get trinkets, which are equippable when selecting a character, but they were never noticed while in a run. There are gems that you can earn, but the payout is paltry and would feed into a long-running, rarely addressed pacing problem in rogue-likes: ability oversaturation.
With gems you can purchase new abilities that will pop up in vendor inventories. But the more abilities you unlock, the less likely they will appear because their chance of showing up will diminish with each new permanent purchase. Soon enough, when I had amassed a group of six or so abilities that worked to my liking, I quit buying anything new. For 100 gems, and for context, an ability up front will cost you between three and ten gems, you can get an additional character for your squad.
So, sitting on an increasing mound of gems, I decided to eventually ignore the store and focus on the bonus you can buy with the currency limited to each attempt.
It turns out that they only activate for the slimmest amount of time at specific intervals. There’s a range from zero to five stars, and you can assign one temporary boost to each star slot. Their activation time was so short that it was nearly imperceptible. Your star level increases based on your performance, so there’s incentive to keep playing better and not reset your rank to reactivate your boosts.
But again, it looked like a shriveled carrot at the end of a comically large stick. The bonuses were so underwhelming that I began to unblinkingly buy whatever boost was at the top of the vendor list just to get through to the next screen. There’s no stat sheet, no boosting your base health or defense, or whatever other mechanic, because none of that is there. It’s a raw fight, you versus the game.
The greatest sensibility lost in the game design is a loss of control, and I found myself all too easily and quickly blaming the game for not throwing a bone my way. While I don’t think this is fair, because maybe I am just a poor player, more objectively speaking, it’s strange that there was no real consistent way to eek out an advantage over a run. There’s no real system or tool kit to utilize to create momentum going forward.
So, I never did. I hunkered down to “git gud” and memorize potential variants, tightened my focus when barraged with frogs (the worst enemy to deal with), and mastered the uncharacteristically imprecise, floaty jump and its awkward propulsion. I settled on the character Emerys since they had an extremely useful dash, and I could easily flood a screen with magic-bouncing bullets, which smoothed out some of the rougher edges of playing.
Big selling points would be what you see in Doinksoft’s fun and imaginative trailers: the constant scroll of the screen, the buddy-buddy banter, the wonderful art design, and general chaos that will get your blood pumping. For some, this will be the game they grew up with and fondly write hours-long video essays about in the years to come.
At times it feels like comparing apples to oranges, looking at retro game design versus contemporary game design. If we wanted to get wild, we could examine the entire fruit bowl. However, I think it’s possible to consider if contemporary game design has more advantages gained than the historic beauty or game feel lost with retro game design. In the case of Dark Scrolls, more was lost in its faithful adherence to the past than gained in the adrenaline-laced drama of each attempt.
