Scathe

My honest first reaction to Scathe was optimism. A three-person dev team mashing bullet hell projectile patterns into a first-person Doom-adjacent shooter set inside a labyrinth sounds like exactly the kind of weird genre salad that punches above its weight. The reality, unfortunately, is messier than that pitch. The movement is fast - genuinely faster than Doom 2016 felt - and the core gun loop has its moments when the Hell Hammer's infinite-ammo assault fire is punching holes through demon hordes and the Bow Blade's circular saw shots are slicing through tighter corridors. Weapons carry secondary fire modes, and dark magic relics picked up from Fallen Mages add freeze attacks, healing, and crowd-crush abilities that at least gesture toward tactical variety. On paper, the toolkit is there. The problem is getting to that toolkit in the first place. Scathe drops you into a sprawling, hand-crafted labyrinth with almost no guidance. The objective - collect Hellstones, unlock Guardian boss doors with runes, escape - is never spelled out in-game. Weapon and spell pickups exist on the map, but the indicators are so faint that reviewers across the board spent extended opening hours stuck with the underpowered starting rifle, which makes early demon encounters feel like a chore rather than the intended kinetic rush. The shared lives pool in co-op (up to four players, drop-in/drop-out) is a clever tension mechanic on paper, but if co-op matchmaking dumps a fresh player mid-fight, those shared lives evaporate fast. The bullet hell angle is the most divisive design decision here. Translating projectile patterns from a top-down or side-scrolling perspective into first-person is genuinely hard to pull off, and the execution in Scathe leans unfair. Enemies and hazards spawn without clear tells, meaning deaths often feel cheap rather than instructive. Health pickups are scarce, and respawns can deposit you directly back into a mob. The Enforcer Edition update did address some of this - dash kills now grant a small health boost, headshots reward ammo, and AI spawn rates were tuned - and the addition of Speedrun Mode (Guardian gauntlets against the clock) and Arcade Mode (pure arena waves with modifiers) gives the game more replay structure than launch day offered. Modifiers like starting with all weapons also let you skip the grind entirely, which is an honest acknowledgment of how rough the progression felt. Solo, Scathe sits at a hard mixed verdict. The movement speed and weapon feel have flashes of real satisfaction, and the atmospheric hellscape visuals hold up at a glance. But the directionless maze, the boss fights that lean more on health-sponge endurance than interesting patterns, and a music loop so short it lapses into silence mid-run all drag the experience down. With three friends who already own it, the shared-lives tension and the labyrinth's branching paths become genuinely more interesting. The problem is that the co-op player base is thin now, years out from launch. If you want a tighter solo alternative, Dusk, Ultrakill, and even the original Doom Eternal are doing more with less. Scathe has the DNA of a better game in it, but the post-launch patches only got it partway there.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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