Scary Girl

I'll be straight with you: I came to Scarygirl expecting a budget curiosity and left with genuinely mixed feelings, which is more than I expected. The visual world here is legitimately striking. The aesthetic pulls from the Nathan Jurevicius graphic novel it's based on, and the result looks like a Tim Burton fever dream crossed with a Neil Gaiman picture book. Levels range from icy yeti caves to Stinky Swamp spider dens to a gridlocked Bad Town full of crossing guards. If you spend thirty seconds watching someone else play, you'll probably stop and look. That's a real achievement for a downloadable platformer from 2012. Under the art direction, though, the mechanics are thinner than they should be. The core combat is built around Scarygirl's tentacle arm: light attacks, heavy attacks, a grapple-and-throw, and a hover move that lets her float across gaps. There's an in-game shop where you spend collected diamonds on upgrades, including named moves like the Anaconda Squeeze and Morph Tendrils, plus swappable Rage Hook attachments that tweak her tentacle abilities. That sounds richer than it plays. Reviewers at launch pointed out that you can't reliably chain moves together, and there's a responsiveness lag in combat that gets noticeably irritating in later levels and boss encounters. The upgrade system gets undermined further because health fish are scattered liberally enough that the currency-for-healing option is almost pointless, and none of the combat upgrades feel essential to finishing the game. Platforming structure is more interesting. Levels feature branching paths visible in the background, with a 2.5D perspective that shows alternate routes receding into the distance before the camera swings back. Picking alternate routes adds replay hooks if you're chasing perfect ratings and collectibles. The dynamic camera angles that sell this effect, however, occasionally obscure upcoming jumps in ways that feel cheap rather than challenging. Tentacle-hook swing points exist but don't give you enough momentum to make them satisfying grapple moments. The overall feel is competent without being crisp. Local co-op lets a second player jump in as Bunniguru, the kung-fu rabbit companion, and the two characters can pull off tandem special moves together. The implementation is limited, though: the camera follows only the primary player, and if one player dies it's game over for both. For a couch co-op session with someone who doesn't care about platformer precision, it works fine. As a serious two-player experience, it won't hold up long. Who is this actually for? Completionists who like hunting branching paths and achievement ticks, parents looking for something that's visually interesting and rated E10+, or anyone with a soft spot for mid-tier early-2010s licensed platformers. If you blew through Rayman Origins and want a peer-level challenge, skip it. At its current sub-five-dollar price tier, the one-to-two-evening runtime is much easier to forgive. Steam's review count is low but sits mostly positive, which tracks: people who found it at the right price tend to appreciate the aesthetic enough to overlook the mechanical roughness. Come for the creepy-cute world. Leave before the later bosses start feeling like a control-input argument rather than a skill test.

Fred · Scout Team

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