Dark Scrolls Preview - A Surprisingly Clear Chaotic Shoot 'Em Up

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There’s something immediately striking about Dark Scrolls, and it’s not just that it carries the usual Devolver energy. This is doinksoft taking a familiar fantasy setup, a lone barbarian/wizard/rogue archetype, a cursed world, a looming demonic threat, and twisting it into something far more frantic and arcade-like than that premise would suggest. It looks traditional at a glance, but the moment it’s in motion, that illusion quickly falls away.

Dark Scrolls is built around fast, repeatable runs that feel closer to a chaotic shoot-’em-up than a methodical dungeon crawler-come-side scroller. Screens quickly fill with enemies, hazards, and projectiles, forcing you to constantly reposition, weave through danger, and react on instinct rather than planning too far ahead. It’s less about carefully clearing spaces and more about surviving them, with combat and movement blending into a kind of controlled panic that defines the entire experience. The different available characters certainly play their part in tackling and/or avoiding the ever-present threats throughout, but the overall flavour and feel - read, panic - remain the same.

What helps sell that is how readable everything is, even at its busiest. doinksoft has always had a knack for clarity in motion, and that’s very much present here. Enemy patterns, attacks, and environmental threats are all easy to parse individually, but the challenge comes from how they stack and overlap. It creates that perfect kind of tension where you always feel like you could have done better, even when things spiral out of control - which they do, often.

Structurally, it leans into roguelite sensibilities without feeling overly bloated. Each run is made up of compact, hand-crafted encounters that are shuffled around, giving the game variety without losing its sense of intentional design. When you inevitably fall, you’re brought back to a central hub where you can unlock new abilities, perks, and upgrades, gradually expanding your toolkit and nudging each subsequent run a little further. It’s a familiar loop, but one that suits the game’s pace and design philosophy well.

There’s a co-op element in play, too, which feels like a natural fit given how hectic things already get, and the potential enjoyment is only multiplied further for each additional character added. Whether that ends up making the game more manageable or pushes it even further into chaos remains to be seen, dependent on difficulty scaling and refinements, but the potential for those “barely surviving by the skin of your teeth” moments is very much there already.

If there’s any hesitation at this stage, it’s simply that Dark Scrolls hasn’t yet shown how far it can stretch its ideas. The core loop is immediately engaging, but longevity will depend on how much variety the full game introduces — in enemies, environments, and the ways you can build out your character. Right now, it feels like a strong foundation that’s begging to be expanded.

Even so, there’s a clear sense of identity here that’s hard to ignore. Dark Scrolls doesn’t feel like it’s chasing trends so much as carving out its own space within them, blending retro fantasy aesthetics with a much more aggressive, arcade-driven design. It’s messy in a deliberate way, fast without feeling sloppy, and confident in what it wants to be.

It may still have more to prove, but as early impressions go, this is one worth keeping firmly on your radar.

You can wishlist Dark Scrolls for yourself over on Steam right now.

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