Scar-Lead Salvation can be succinctly summed up as PS5 classic Returnal with an Anime aesthetic. It’s a third-person action-adventure roguelike, then, and one that sees its heroine battle through waves of robots to recover her memory and escape the mysterious factory she finds herself trapped within. Unfortunately, there’s also another way to describe Scar-Lead Salvation: a torrid, unfinished mess.
Things start off promisingly enough. Your amnesiac avatar certainly looks cool, decked out in chunky armour and with that distinct anime visual style imbuing her with bucket loads of charm. She moves well too, smoothly darting around each enclosed area, blasting away with a multitude of weapons as she goes. In a neat touch, her armour is damaged and falls away as she’s injured, giving you a nice visual signifier of how close you are to death.
Initially, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing wrong with the game. Our hero shoots some bland looking robots, causing them to explode in a satisfactory manner. The floating big robo balls and giant can machines she faces spew out patterns of pulsing laser blasts, forcing the player to dodge and parry through the bullet hell. Once you are victorious you move on through an interconnecting corridor to a new room to do it all again.
Things become concerning when nothing changes. You face the same floating big robo balls and giant can machines again and again. Sure, a turret might get added, but you are ostensibly fighting the same handful of enemies, with boredom soon setting in. Worse, your foes are dumb as under-achieving bricks, mostly doing nothing until you attack. They don’t try to flank the player, pursue them, overwhelm them, or do anything interesting at all really, they just politely wait until you start shooting them.
Now, with most roguelikes, after clearing an area you get a choice of doors, usually with an indication of a certain type of enemy you’ll face or a specific reward you might earn for picking that path. Not so in Scar-Lead Salvation, as while there are always three doors leading out of every arena, two of them are inexplicably locked. I thought, at some point, as the game opens up, surely these doors will become accessible? Nope, this is a roguelike with a strictly linear path, leading to an incredibly tedious gameplay loop without a hint of self-determination. Worse, despite the basic visuals and bland environments, the game insists you run along a dull identical series of corridors to reach the next area, presumably to give it time to load up the encounter. As you careen along the next corridor, there’s some turgid banter between our protagonist and the AI voice that is guiding her. I wouldn’t bother trying to pay much attention; both characters are snarky, whiny, and deeply unlikeable.
The gameplay is so very boring. Partly because the game is insanely easy, outside of a scripted moment. I just didn’t die, which is kind of the whole point of a roguelike. But also, because every arena is the same grey shoe box shaped space with a slightly different configuration of walls, I became increasingly glassy-eyed, blasting away at more identical robo cans, but then I had an epiphany. The door out of the arena isn’t even locked.
That’s right, you don’t actually need to fight the enemies, you can just run straight through to the next corridor. Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that would be a bad idea as, without killing enemies, how will you level up and receive powerful new abilities? Well, by collecting the new weapons and power ups in one of the reward rooms that pepper your journey – though, you don’t really need to bother choosing a new weapon, as the basic machine gun you get at the start is by far the best and will see you to the end.
In fact, so dull has the combat become, I elected to just run through each room, avoiding the robo cans and – in a new enemy type shocker – some drone thingies, until I reached the bosses. The bosses are rubbish too, there’s no tactics or strategy required, no attack patterns to overcome, just strafe and shoot for ten minutes and you’ll win. Shockingly, the frame rate drops at these points, resulting in lags and pauses that are just embarrassing considering the two or three polygons being thrown around on screen.
From the second boss onwards, the frame rate really gets choppy, even on PS5, but, fear not, because after a few hours or more of struggling through this drudgery, Scar-Lead Salvation comes to a welcome conclusion. And that’s the end of that.