You are about to see a scary world. Your goal is to survive just ten minutes in this bouncy, bumpy, dynamic and surprising bullet heaven. Inspired by Vampire Survivors.
Positive
15 Steam reviews
| LANGUAGE | AUDIO | SUBTITLES | INTERFACE |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | — | Y | Y |
Scary World is a very focused Bullet Heaven in the spirit of Vampire Survivors.
A wall of lava drives you ever to the right on the game's single map. Your goal: To power up enough before it forces you to fight the boss that awaits at the end. If you defeat it, a portal opens that takes you back to the map's beginning, now with stronger enemies. If you play defensively from here, you'll soon have beaten the "official" objective of surviving for 10 minutes.
The game explains little of its mechanics, and so it highly rewards you for paying attention to and learning them (e.g. bonuses you trigger), as well as the map's layout.
The streamlined design makes Scary World feel very unique in a saturated genre.
Late disclaimer: I have only beaten the minimal challenge of surviving for 10 minutes a couple of times, and only on the lowest difficulty.
The game may well expand past that point. I can't say if I would like that better or worse.
Still cutting my teeth with it, but if you're remotely familiar with the style of Vampire Survivors, you can see 2.5 hours being a decent chunk of time for these types of games.
In current state, I do not recommend it.
It wants to be different which I respect, but in doing so it removes essential elements that are needed in games like this:
- re-roll option(s) for items.
- unique passives.
- some form of a small leveling system for each character.
The game in it current state is unbalanced and where I should feel pretty strong with a Level 5+ item; it does nothing at all different to make me feel like I'm causing an impact.
Thanks for the recommendation tom! fantastic little game for a little price
Cool game.
I really enjoyed this game.
I think those who are fans of Vampire survivors or similar titles will probably get quite a bit of enjoyment out of it.
I find the weapons in this game take a bit more getting used to, I'd say this game requires a bit more mechanical skill than something like vampire survivors which is more focused on knowledge.
Balance and scaling is terrible, when I'm 20 level in I should not be having difficulty with the first enemy type. Several visual bugs, including invisible mobs and bullets. Abilities are boring, and don't improve in meaningful ways. You MUST memorize the level layout and shops to have a chance at winning. No meta progression, and no characters have unique weapons or skills. It's only 3$ but this should be labeled early access imo.
Think vampires survivors but with a spin, you are always on the move unless you wanna feel warm in a fire, but exploration is a key to getting more powerful. On your journey you can take extra paths to find chests or shops dotted around before going back to the original path. The upgrades screen is clean, and easy to understand, abilities feel decent.
I have read a review about the movement, it has a feeling like your on ice, though I wouldn't go as far to say it's uncontrollable. Gotta say, I tend to turn music off when playing games as I watch youtube or films as I game, but the music on this is actually quite relaxing.
I'll edit when I have beat the first main guy to add about replayability, right now you have a few characters to unlock, each starting with different abilities aswell as passive abilities.
"I hope I don't have a bad dream, of a scary world"
I have bad news for you. Scary World is here! And it's intense!
Run around with poison trail, blow up your enemies, or find the secret Wizard. The choice is yours.
It's a lot of fun to knock all the little guys around on screen. And when you kill the big eyeball, it explodes with eyeball juice everywhere, which is really gross. The "diamond abilities" you can get by mixing and matching the different colored ability gems is a really cool mechanic, and adds a lot of strategy to which abilities you go for. It's hard to put down, I keep wanting to try just one more time!
The dev also only made this game in about a month, which is really impressive. Support indies or die!
Things other survivor-likes can learn from this one: 1) Shorter match lengths are great, escalate more quickly, come to a close, let me try again. 2) Don't be afraid of actual physics, i.e. not just projectiles dealing damage, but momentum, bodies being pushed around, slingshotting yourself across the level etc. VS gave you a license for jankiness, so lean into it!
This is a really interesting take on the VS genre, definitely worth a play!
+Gameplay is fun and addictive
+Pixel art is cool to look at
+Attacks are very satisfying
+Music is nice
-Movement is a little floaty
-I did start getting occasional stuttering and slowdowns at 7-10 minutes
This is a great VS-like with short runs, exciting gameplay and lighthearted, wacky aesthetics.
The quick round times make it easy to play a few quick rounds, and just as easy to go "one more try" over and over again for hours. It only takes a minute or two before things get challenging, and your build decisions start to play out.
The character abilities and build options feel distinct, and create different movement and attacking strategies.
The fluid movement, while a divergence from typical VS-like controls, is incorporated throughout the gameplay, with movement and momentum influencing some of the weapons, boost pads, and some additional tension with collecting xp, as it circles around you gradually. You have to keep on the move to avoid the more mobile enemies, rather than parking it and collecting xp. I find myself preferring it more and more to the staid, linear movement in VS.
The music is excellent, and the art style, while simple, is quite readable, which is the most important thing for this type of game.
Overall a fun, highly replayable, and unique entry in the bullet heaven / VS-like genre.
This game is really hooky and dynamic. It has that addictive appeal of VS style games, but I really like the movement in this. It's got some acceleration and inertia, so there is this satisfying "oomf" to it all. The game is also really funny. Great sense of humor. For a game of this kind, there is a surprising amount of depth in the mechanics.
I beta tested this during development, and I continue to find surprises with each and every run.
Designed to be about 10 minutes of fun, but very high replay value. I highly recommend you enter this SCARY WORLD.
This is a cool little VS-like with short 5-10 minute runs, definitely preferred to the longer 30 minute runs. The goal is to survive for 10 minutes and kill some bosses along the way with some different starting packages based on the character you pick.
The developer is very diligent about updating bugs / inconsistencies. There were 5 patches on just release day!
Vampire Survivors-like, except you skid around like you're on an ice rink being mobbed by giant clouds of motorcycle riding demons and bats. So many bats! It is not a game that takes itself very seriously, but it sure is fun.
There are many enjoyable weapons to blow stuff up with. Flaming rulers, bouncing shells that hurt you as often as the foe, pools of lava, deadly explosive Christmas ornaments that leave broken glass lying all around, a "Laser Champ" who comments sagaciously on your current situation ("Scary Skeleton Detected"), "Roly Poly" which sends you rotating and speeding all around the arena - usually crashing into a crowd of things and getting murdered - and many more.
As usual for these games, the fun is trying to survive long enough to become a death machine, but Scary World is much shorter than Vampire Survivors and the danger ramps up fast. If you do get ahead of the curve, the game will catch up pretty quickly (particularly once you get past 10 minutes).
The physics mostly behaves but occasionally goes nuts, which is funny; things fly around the screen (including yourself) like pinballs. Probably that will be patched at some point. Perhaps it shouldn't be.
Sometimes, if I am lucky, I scale up enough to wipe out the entire screen as soon as it appears. And it. Is. Glorious. Most of the time, however, I am dead in about 3 minutes. Such is life in this scary world.
(playtime does not include the many hours I spent playtesting earlier builds).
Disclaimer: I did play a playtest version of the game for free before release
At a base level Scary world ist just a well done game similar to Vampire Survivors. But it has a couple really neat things going for it.
1. The match length is really short. You win the game after 10 minutes. There is no staring at blinking lights on the screen for 20 minutes while your build automatically clear everything on screen in this game. The maximum game length is 10 minutes and if don't play well early a match can be over very quickly. This leads to a great gameloop where you are constantly trying stuff out, seeing what works and what doesn't and improve at the game.
2. The difficulty system works well. After playing this game for quite a while it did seem pretty easy so I upped the difficulty settings (called Scary Levels in the setings) by a few levels and the game was immediatley noticably harder, I was dying a lot, had a lot of runs that where just 2 minutes long. But when runs are just 2 minutes long you can get a lot of runs in a short time and improve at the game and soon I was getting further and further into the game. I got the the first boss, then on the next run to the second boss and a couple runs later I had beaten then game at that higher difficulty mode. So I cranked the difficulty up again. As of writing this the highest difficulty mode I've beaten is level 6 and there are a total of 10 and as this game is still in early access I'm sure that should level 10 get beaten by a lot of players a new one will be added. There are also 7 characters in the game with different strength some of which work as an interesting handicap mode. Just keep in mind that while you may be able to beat the game on difficulty 6 with mazrael and derby you may still have to turn back the difficulty level to maybe 2 or 3 for some of the harder characters.
3. The Lava means you always gotta be on the move and know where to go. There is a constantly advancing lavaflow that comes from the left of the screen and is eventually gonna envellop the whole stage so you constantly gotta move to the right. You can and for a lot of builds should temporarily set up in a place and farm mobs there but you always gotta pack up quicky and move to a different place. And you gotta use the time you have to get strong enough so you can beat the final boss of the stage to unlock a portal to the next stage because otherwise the lava is gonna get to you.
4. The music is really good. Every character has their own track and they are all bangers.
Also I am playing this game on Fedora Linux through Proton on a potato right now so In case you to are playing on a Potato running Linux or a SteamDeck the game should run just fine.
