Pass the Fear

Introduction

Pass the Fear drops one to several hunters into procedurally generated acts, stacking guns, relics and rerollable affixes into runs that escalate from a manageable opening into screen-filling chaos. Developed by PlayMud Studio and published by Paras Games, it left a closely-followed demo period to fully release 22 July 2026, and its reception has landed "Very Positive," 87.8% across 180 reviews, on a 100-review English sample this review reads in full. That's a strong headline number, and the positive sample explains why in specific, consistent terms — but the negative sample raises a genuinely interesting problem worth taking seriously: reviewers disagree sharply with each other about which direction the game's balance is actually broken in.

Combat and builds that earn the comparisons

The strongest, most repeated praise compares Pass the Fear favourably to two well-regarded predecessors: "Gunfire reborn, but Enter the Gungeon," reads one review, and several others credit responsive combat feel and a genuine loot-goblin itch as the game's core hook. The build system backs that up on paper — ten relic slots, two weapons each carrying its own modifier, rerollable affixes running up to a mythic tier, and keyword synergies (one reviewer specifically walks through "embarkation" and "destination" triggers) that let dedicated players chase deliberately broken combinations. Boss fights draw specific praise across the sample, including from reviewers otherwise critical of the game, and the shared meta-progression tree layered across multiple playable characters gives runs a sense of accumulating structure rather than resetting to zero each time.

A difficulty curve arguing with itself

Where the sample gets genuinely hard to read cleanly is difficulty and balance, because reviewers report opposite experiences from what sounds like the same systems. "Poor balance lead to very easy game, where everything on the screen — including bosses — dying in seconds," reads one negative review, arguing that higher difficulty tiers hand out better relics and therefore make broken one-button builds more accessible rather than less. A different negative review describes the exact opposite: "there is a serious difficulty spike in the middle acts," where enemies become bullet-spongy enough that the reviewer reached the final difficulty tier in around five hours and found the fights had stopped being fun well before that. A third simply asks whether the game "is correctly balanced for solo player," pointing at enemy health pools that feel tuned around a full co-op group. Read together, that's not three unrelated complaints — it's the signature of a build system with enough swing between weak and broken combinations that the difficulty curve feels wildly different depending on what a given run's relics happen to roll, a genuinely unsettled state for a game just out of its demo period.

Performance, region locks, and a translation complaint

A cluster of more concrete technical problems sits alongside the balance debate. One reviewer reports a framerate collapse from a steady 150-plus down to an unplayable 15 mid-run, unresolved by adjusting graphics settings; a Steam Deck-focused review confirms the game runs "mostly fine" there but flags the same kind of late-game framerate dip once builds produce heavy area-of-effect and projectile counts. A sharper launch-day complaint comes from a reviewer unable to play co-op with a specific friend due to cross-region multiplayer restrictions, refunding as a direct result despite enjoying the demo. A separate, specific complaint recurs across Chinese-language reviews in the sample: regardless of which character or gender a player selects, in-game dialogue addresses them uniformly as "Mr. Hunter," an immersion-breaking translation choice multiple reviewers in that segment call out by name as something the developers should have caught.

What the achievement data shows

Pass the Fear tracks 58 achievements under Steam's default, unlocalized naming, which limits how precisely the numbers can be tied to specific milestones, but the shape of the curve is still informative. A cluster of early achievements sits above 87%, consistent with a forgiving, welcoming opening stretch several reviewers also describe. From there the numbers fall in stages rather than one cliff — several mid-tier achievements cluster in the 35-42% range before the two rarest drop to 13.9% and 5.3%. That staged, uneven falloff is consistent with the review sample's own account of a game where reaching the credits is realistic for a good share of players, but where the hardest or most build-specific challenges remain a minority pursuit.

Value and where it's headed

At NZ$26.75 with no DLC or in-app purchases found at review time, Pass the Fear sits at a fair price for a roguelite with this much build depth on paper, though several reviewers explicitly tie their satisfaction to co-op sessions with friends rather than solo play, and at least one reviewer frames weapon variety — around two to three meaningful options per weapon type at launch — as thin enough to hope for post-launch additions rather than a finished picture. One of the most positive reviews in the sample hopes explicitly for exactly that: "Hope they be popping out the content after 1.0 — more guns/relics/chars/synergies etc would be nice," a sentiment that captures the overall shape of the sample well — real enthusiasm for what's here, paired with a clear-eyed sense that balance, performance, and content breadth all still have room to firm up.

Final Verdict

Pass the Fear earns its "Very Positive" launch score on real strengths: combat that draws favourable comparisons to genre favourites, a build-crafting system deep enough to produce genuinely broken combinations, and boss fights that land even with critical reviewers. What holds it back from an outright strong recommendation today is a difficulty curve its own players can't agree on, real performance dips in longer or more chaotic runs, and a handful of launch-week gaps around multiplayer region restrictions and weapon variety. For a group willing to treat it as a still-settling co-op roguelite rather than a finished, balanced solo experience, there's a genuinely good game underneath the rough edges.