Death by Scrolling Review

Racing the Reaper up a bureaucratic afterlife, one screen at a time

Death by Scrolling marks a genre departure for Ron Gilbert's Terrible Toybox, the studio behind Thimbleweed Park and Return to Monkey Island, trading point-and-click puzzling for a vertically scrolling roguelite set in Purgatory, inc. -- a fussy, bureaucratic afterlife where players race upward through endless levels, dodging the Reaper and collecting gold and gems to pay a demanding Ferryman's toll. Published by MicroProse Software and released 28 October 2025 at a modest NZ$11.79, the game sits at Mostly Positive across 177 reviews, and its sample tells a clear, consistent story: reviewers love the concept, art, and humour, and are meaningfully divided on whether the moment-to-moment gameplay backs it up over repeated sessions.

The presentation draws broadly consistent praise. Reviewers repeatedly single out the pixel art and Gilbert's signature dry, tongue-in-cheek humour, with the afterlife-bureaucracy premise -- complete with the Ferryman's exorbitant fees and a cast of quirky underworld characters -- landing well even among reviewers otherwise lukewarm on the core loop. One reviewer, an admitted fan of Gilbert's adventure-game work rather than roguelites specifically, writes that "not every Ron Gilbert game needs to be related to his adventure game work" and enjoys the art regardless of the genre shift. Steam Deck performance and comfort come up unprompted across a large number of reviews as a specific strength, with several reviewers explicitly calling it a perfect Deck pick-up-and-play title, and the soundtrack -- a rock-inflected run theme paired with a calmer between-run variant -- earns its own consistent praise. At its low asking price, reviewers across both the positive and negative camps largely agree the game is fairly priced for what it offers.

Where the sample splits is depth, and the criticism arrives with real specificity from reviewers who know the genre well. A large number of negative reviews come from players with backgrounds in Vampire Survivors, Risk of Rain 2, and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, several explicitly stating they hoped for a build-driven power fantasy and instead found runs that feel largely samey after five or six attempts. One detailed negative review argues the developer "either declined to look at what other games in the genre do right, or intentionally" chose a more restrained design, and multiple reviewers use words like "boring," "tedious," and "repetitive" to describe combat once its initial novelty fades -- several citing the half-hour to few-hour mark as when the game's limits become apparent. A specific, recurring design complaint concerns weapon pickups: several reviewers say weapons have limited uses and break mid-run, a mechanic they call an unfun way to lose momentum compared to the persistent, escalating loadouts typical of genre leaders. Meta-progression draws its own complaint, with a number of reviewers describing the gem currency used to unlock permanent upgrades as slow and disheartening to farm given its low drop rates.

A handful of reviewers who enjoyed the game nonetheless flag rougher edges: a lengthy, text-heavy tutorial that one reviewer says should have been taught through play rather than pages of explanation, sound-mixing complaints about loud attack effects that persist even after lowering volume sliders, and at least one reviewer reporting a full progress wipe with no developer acknowledgement at the time of writing, alongside a complaint that post-launch patches have prioritised bug fixes over the depth and balance concerns raised by the broader community. It's worth noting some of that frustration is aimed less at what the game currently is than at what reviewers hoped a Ron Gilbert-attached roguelite would become -- several negative reviews explicitly frame the game as having "potential" undercut by what they see as thin execution, rather than dismissing the underlying idea outright.

It's also worth weighing how reviewers who stuck with the game longest describe their experience. Several of the most positive reviews come from players who logged well over a thousand minutes, describing runs that "open up" significantly past the five-to-six-level mark most negative reviewers stopped at, with new enemies, areas, and combo options appearing as players push further -- a genuine content gate that rewards persistence but that several critical reviewers say the game does a poor job signalling up front. That gap between early and late impressions is a useful thing for a prospective buyer to weigh: at this price, the risk of bouncing off in the first few runs is real and well documented, but the reviewers who pushed past that point report a noticeably richer game than the one described in the most common negative reviews.

It's worth putting the pedigree in context, too. Terrible Toybox has spent most of its history on narrative adventure games, and reviewers who came in expecting the studio's usual strengths -- intricate puzzles, memorable dialogue, a slower pace -- were always going to be judging the studio against a different set of design priorities than the ones a dedicated roguelite team would bring. Several of the more forgiving reviews explicitly frame the game this way, treating it less as a genre-leading roguelite and more as a well-crafted studio's first pass at a genre it hasn't made before, complete with the sense of humour and dialogue writing that carries over from Gilbert's other work even where the mechanical systems don't quite match established genre benchmarks. That framing doesn't erase the specific, repeated complaints about weapon durability and thin meta-progression, but it does help explain why so many reviewers land on "good idea, needs more" rather than dismissing the game outright -- the goodwill built by the presentation and writing buys the mechanical shortcomings real patience from a meaningful share of the sample.

Taken as a whole, Death by Scrolling succeeds at what it's most confidently selling -- a charming, low-stakes, Steam Deck-friendly diversion with real personality -- while falling short, for a meaningful share of its own review sample, of the deeper build-crafting power fantasy its marketing and genre framing implicitly promise. At its price, that's a reasonable trade for players going in with the right expectations; for players hoping for the next Vampire Survivors, the reviews suggest a more mixed outcome than the Mostly Positive headline score alone conveys.