Ron Gilbert returned last year with an intriguing little indie title which has now made the jump to consoles. Death By Scrolling isn’t the man’s usual fare, though, tossing aside the point-and-click puzzle solving for roguelike mechanics and auto-attacks. It’s cute, has a slightly cosy vibe and features a cool concept, but struggles to stay interesting.

The afterlife is a promised land, but you’re stuck in purgatory with a grim reaper that’s determined to mess up your day even more. The goal here isn’t to defeat death in a one-on-one fistfight; it’s to gather up enough gold to pay the ferryman for passage to the afterlife. Just run upwards, grabbing as many coins as you can, whether they’re on the ground, in bags, or hiding in treasure chests. If monsters get in the way, evade them or get them in range for your auto-attacks to dole out some violence.

Available On: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By: Terrible Toybox NZ
Published By: Microprose
Price: $7.99/£6.39

Review code provided by the publisher.

There’s a catch, though: each time you successfully escape with one of the six characters, the ferryman’s price rises, so you’ll need to go further and further to gather up the gold. Inflation is a bitch, and even purgatory is not immune to its evil. 7,500 gold for the last ride? Well, now it’s an even 10k, baby. Now pay up or stay stuck.

Death By Scrolling’s big gimmick is a pretty fun concept: the camera is always slowly heading north, scrolling upwards across the pixelated landscape, taking with it a wall of flame at the bottom of the screen. Get too close to the scrolling doom and your run is done, so you need to keep ahead of it and make it to the next camp to restock, take a breath and jump into the next portal.

It almost makes the inclusion of Death chasing you—a concept we’ve seen in quite a few games like this—feel pointless, like putting a cherry on a cherry. He’ll end your life with a single swipe of his scythe, but is mostly just an inconvenience as he’s easily evaded. Well, unless the game just spawns him at the worst point on the map, or it decides he’s going to be super speedy for some reason. But on the flipside, he can be easily slowed with ranged attacks or evaded by letting him get stuck on an obstacle. Nothing stops death, except a fence. Or a small barn. Sometimes even a couple of trees.

I mentioned a camp. These are your safe spaces, a momentary pause to catch your breath. Not that this is a stressful game, mind you. It’s pretty chill. The screen might always be scrolling, but unless you truly aren’t paying attention, you’ll be able to keep away from it fairly easily. I only died by scrolling a couple of times—the rest were from getting mobbed by monsters.

Still, camp gives you three random chance cards to choose from that provide little boosts until you die. Plus, there’s an NPC who will have lost a valuable item you can return for bonus gold, and the Gem shop where you purchase permanent upgrades. And, of course, the Ferryman is waiting, in case you managed to gather up enough gold to pay the toll.

This is the type of game where you are meant to make run after run after run, gradually getting a bit further each time. Overall progression is handled by collecting Gems across every run, and then spending them on cards which provide permanent boosts. It’s simple stuff—maybe a melee range boosting card here, some extra health, a larger pickup range. It’s also boring. Not bad. Not good. It works, but we’ve seen it dozens of times, and the upgrades are purely stat boosts with nothing interesting to be found anywhere.

And therein lies the big problem: once you’ve moved past the gimmick, everything else is bog-standard. After just a couple of runs, you’ve seen the game and what it’s offering you. It’s probably deeply unfair to draw comparisons with the likes of Hades 2, which constantly adds new things, but that thought kept floating through my head. In fact, it’s closer to Devil Jam, which I reviewed a few weeks back, both of which suffer from the same issue of not having enough variety.

As you gobble up gold like a kleptomaniac hoover, you’ll need to scour the map for weapons and power-ups. There are bows, swords, rocket launchers and much more to find, along with other useful things like damage absorption, the ability to walk on water, and being able to fire off multiple projectiles. All of these things don’t last long, though—weapons have limited uses before breaking, and power-ups are usually on a timer. So you’ll need to swap constantly throughout the short 2–4 minute levels.

It’s an approach that means you don’t do what you often would in other examples of the genre. You aren’t putting together the coolest builds, the most powerful combinations. Sure, there are some power-ups and weapons that work together better than others, but you won’t have them for long. This means runs tend to blur together. In games like Vampire Survivors, Brotato and Hades, it’s often the run where you combo together one hell of a build that stands out, but Death By Scrolling doesn’t form those memories.

There are some balance issues that left me a little annoyed, too. I hit a wall where I had already successfully saved two of the easiest characters and now needed 10,000g per crossing. At this point, the game seemed to really ramp up the difficulty, specifically at around camps 6–8, where enemy damage output went nuts, the Reaper seemed able to catch me far quicker than before, and I was struggling. The Gem grind was in full swing, so getting any upgrades that made a real, tangible difference was taking ages. Compared to some other games in this genre, where it always feels like you’re making at least some progress, Death By Scrolling sometimes leaves you with nothing.

Then there are a few technical issues to discuss. Trophies are currently busted on PlayStation. Some are not counting properly; the one for completing level 9 won’t unlock, etc. These will likely be patched quickly enough, though.

Repetition is the foundation games like Death By Scrolling are built upon. Repeat and repeat and repeat. The trick is making that repetition fun via progression and strong gameplay, but in those regards, Death By Scrolling doesn’t hit the mark. The progression is basic and boring, and the gameplay doesn’t support the dozens and dozens of playthroughs it wants you to do.

But… there is a simplicity to it that works. This is a pretty chilled game compared to some of the others with thousands of foes and chaos. You make split-second decisions, sure, but it’s all kind of cosy and relaxed. So if that’s what you’re looking for, maybe Death By Scrolling is worth a look, especially since it costs about the same as a Starbucks coffee. Otherwise, there’s a host of other games in this style that are better.