ScourgeBringer

ScourgeBringer delights itself in pulling no punches.

Players will die at a furious, brutal pace. Whether it be a massive beam of energy, undodged bullet, or the bite of a lowly insect, dying feels bad. ScourgeBringer doesn’t care. Your angry tears and tightly gripped controller mean nothing outside of a lesson that this was your fault and you could do better.

Being moderately experienced with roguelites and roguelikes and dozens of procedurally-generated, difficulty-spiked games, I brushed off my expectations for ScourgeBringer. If anything, the first sequence of levels would be a precarious cakewalk. The first boss may prove to be a moderate challenge but felled in the third or fourth attempt.

ScourgeBringer tossed me around like a ragdoll, happily killing me in a multitude of ways. If I had to guess, I finally beat the first main boss after about 30 attempts, which seems like a baffling number. But death can come quickly in this game primarily because it is a severe test of player skill that rarely provides breathing room.

As Khyra, players are the strongest warrior in their tribe. Khyra’s quest is to enter the ScourgeBringer a towering labyrinth that descended onto the world and decimated the planet. Countless others have ventured into the ScourgeBringer but have not returned. Possibly the cycle will end with Khyra and perhaps a salvation for humanity will be found.

Being the “last hope” for everyone allows the difficulty of ScourgeBringer to seep deeper in the pores, providing weight and meaning behind the stakes. I just didn’t think that so early on in Khyra’s quest through randomly generated levels that her demise would be a weird floating devil thing or a bug that slowly telegraphed its attack. Yet I persisted for hours. Hoping against hope that I would make progress.

Eventually, the madness induced by the difficulty becomes smoothed over and those edges expose ScourgeBringer‘s truly efficient combat. In a way, the game feels almost unremarkable in terms of its mechanical depth. Khyra can double jump, she can run up walls. The extremely agile warrior carries a sword and a gun and can dash forward, slicing anything in her path. Very little of ScourgeBringer‘s combat is conducted on the ground. Instead, players are meant to remain airborne in hopes of maintaining a fluid edge and advantage.

When players enter any room in the game, all action takes place on one screen. There’s no double-wide rooms or playing with the borders. Khyra enters from a cardinal direction and enemies appear out of thin air. Kill those enemies and another group appears. Keep killing and exits will open. Whether tight squares or ruthless corridors, ScourgeBringer prides its action on being very readable. Players will be able to identify where enemies will come from by a puff of white smoke. The toned-down pixel art focuses its colors on any moving entity, whether friendly or foe.

After numerous deaths I begin to recognize the patterns the game was laying out. It first started with knowing the design of a room. Stocky chunks of platform allow players to kite enemies around and avoid fire. Thin terrain allows a safe place to jump to when spikes unceremoniously jut from the ground. Eventually I sussed out when a larger devil… thingy would appear in a room and positioned Khyra out of its path.

ScourgeBringer is less about taking a tactical advantage and more about being the aggressor. There are very limited invulnerability frames after being hit, meaning that the small initial maximum health pool will dry up rapidly. A large number of the enemies that appear on screen at once will die to one or two hits. But start adding in enemies that take several hits and can shoot bullets. Or ones that take several seconds to kill. There are those that clamber along walls to line up a shot or foes that can cover an entire screen with deadly energy or explode on contact.

Soon, every moment in ScourgeBringer becomes a chessboard of danger. Except here, both sides are rapidly closing in on the player.

Khyra’s toolkit is meant to maintain and regain momentum at anytime. The double-jump is a godsend and the dash can be chained together, meaning that our hero is virtually flying the entire time. Players can stun enemies with a heavy attack meant to remove a torrent of bullets for a brief moment. Juggling the timing is crucial in ScourgeBringer and a technique that took me a dozen or so deaths to figure out.

At first, I did not realize that the game was trying to teach me that hesitation meant the enemies would frequently get in a free hit. I realized just because it looked cool, I could not dash around the screen in hopes of hurting those who would hurt me. And later levels ratchet up the hazards and amount of death combinations.

There came a time when I realized I was playing ScourgeBringer and frequently forgetting that Khyra had a gun. After damaging foes, Khyra’s gun will reload with bullets that usually hit the closest enemy for massive damage. I couldn’t tell you how many times in the midst of battle I thought to myself “oh yeah” and blindly fired a few rounds. It wasn’t until much later that the gun became a crucial aid to helping my runs go on for longer.

I partially blame the intensity of ScourgeBringer‘s combat for this temporary amnesia. Often when playing action games, I forget about my bevy of available skills until far later because I’m so laser-focused on using brute force. And ScourgeBringer just isn’t built like that. Players need to be focused and aware of the ever-changing dangers that are presented.

Once I beat the first major boss and moved into the second area, I was met with a new cast of baddies with new attack patterns that ground my bones beneath their boots. Yet another obstacle I had to carefully learn and master my way through. It felt daunting to say the least.

To lessen player agony, there is a skill tree players can use to slowly unlock increasingly helpful permanent upgrades for Khyra. These skills can be purchased with Judge Blood, the currency rewarded when defeating mini-bosses and the main bosses, called Judges. In this tree, players will find upgrades to maximum health, the ability to teleport around the map, a way to reflect enemy bullets when hitting them with a heavy attack, and more. Players can unlock a combo counter that rewards more Blood during a run that will make the absurd shop prices more practical.

ScourgeBringer continues to build on itself but never moves away from a few core conceits. It is unflinchingly a roguelite game and nestles in that genre with few concessions. What surprised me, however, was that as difficult as a game this is, it’s one of the few in the genre to offer a number of difficulty and accessibility options. Players can make themselves invincible if they want to play through the game with no worries and merely see everything or prepare for future encumbered runs. There are options for speed, increasing drops, and toning down enemies.

Better yet, there is a less intrusive option meant to adapt the game’s difficulty based on how players are doing. I went for this option and infrequently had a merchant drop me free upgrades and found that I had more random drops that helped me out. ScourgeBringer rarely had an item that made me think “oh wow” or truly impressed me. More often than not, it was a new gun or an upgrade that felt generally more passive than active. Still, this is a welcome option for players who find the game too daunting or want to learn levels and attacks patterns without constantly having to restart a run.

ScourgeBringer can be maddeningly difficult in the best and worst ways. It will shove players through the meat grinder and be completely unapologetic. But it’s in this crucible that I learned to love the frantic, deadly simplicity of its combat and the agile nature of tackling tough challenges. For genre stalwarts, ScourgeBringer may not offer anything entirely new but hones its enjoyment through sheer skill and the hopes that players won’t give up until the brutal end.