ScourgeBringer - Preview, discovering an intriguing rougelite

I rarely spend many hours on early access titles: thanks to the same developers who give us the opportunity to try the title and get important feedback from our tests, as well as those of the paying users who trust idealize their purchase as a sign of support , many times it happens to be in the hands of products that are quite anonymous or far from the final objectives, which is why it is really difficult to see their true potential. Every now and then it happens to put your hand to titles that from the very beginning prove to be really functional and intriguing for what they manage to propose in preview. Here, ScourgeBringer represents that title that pad (or keyboard and mouse) in hand, manages to keep you glued for several hours, amusing beyond all expectations. All this in early access.

ScourgeBringer is the name of a mysterious alien monolith that appeared in the skies and wreaked havoc on planet Earth. In a state of chaos, some have managed to reach it and find an entrance that leads to unknown worlds. Many have entered, no one has ever left. In the shoes of the young woman Kyhra, girl with fiery white hair, a sword and a mechanical support dedicated to fire from afar, will enter the mysterious structure, with the mission to end the apocalypse and discover the mysteries of the mysterious monolith.

A pure Rougelite

The genre of rougelike and rougelite in recent years have seen an incredible increase in titles, facets and experimentation. ScourgeBringer is just the latest of these, with a graphic style in full swing pixel art and strong contaminations new weird and vaporwave. The work of the boys of Flying oak games draws heavily on titles such as Dead Cells and Celeste, to create a hybrid, geared towards challenging and never frustrating rougelite.

The game maps, procedurally created with the classic recycling of assets, will be made up of rooms full of enemies. To get out and open the other doors we will have to clean up the latter, which will divide into a first harmless wave which will be followed by a second more strengthened one. Clearly, at the beginning, you will die a lot, not for lack of upgrades, but to get into the perspective of the gameplay and combat mechanics: in fact ScourgeBringer will prefer the combat in the air, chaining combos useful to make us spin around the room and alternate blows with the sword (normal, heavy and with snap) a shots from a distance through ours mechanical support that will follow us everywhere. The cleaning of the rooms is unfortunately closed in this small mode, two mini waves, our Kyhra increasingly master of her skills and upgrades and relative drop by the enemies who will be distinguished in spheres of blood and spheres - in fact - of upgrades.

Upon our death, we will be catapulted into a room where we can expand our skill tree thanks to a magic tree. We will use the enhancement balls to put small bells on the many branches, a sign of the unlocking of a particular ability or passive enhancement such as attack or life points. There will be rooms where you can find vendors and use the spheres of blood or small enhancement altars that will give us, for the run in progress, some upgrades to the game statistics (greater attack in case of low life points, increased speed and so on).

But the bosses will be very difficult, whose room will be opened after defeating a midboss to search in the map. Against the bosses of the end of the world we will have to practice all our best skills in circling the room and striking at the right moment. We will be constantly targeted by shots from a distance that will give us an almost minimal margin of maneuver, so to err even by half a millimeter, is equivalent to losing a life point.

Once the boss is defeated, all we have to do is access the next world (same assets, different aesthetic reason) where we will find a percentage of enemies and greater difficulty. The developers, probably encouraged by the excellent feedback obtained - to which we also add our - have already proposed a succulent roadmap until March, with a massive update on stats, new worlds and weapons towards the end of February, and then in March there will be another update to delve into the game lore and other optimizations that will cover weapons and abilities. If you are a lover of the genre and looking for the classic little pearl in a sea of ​​bottomless repetitiveness, ScourgeBringer is a title not to be missed and observe its evolution step by step.