Pass the Fear review

There’s a moment in any respectable action roguelike where things start to click. Your bullets start doing something they weren’t doing three minutes ago, your DPS (damage per second) numbers are soaring, and for a brief moment, you almost feel invincible. Pass the Fear, the new bullet-hell roguelite from Paras Games, nails that feeling better than most of its peers. The trouble is what happens next.

You play a demon hunter whose trapped on an island enduring the Witch’s Disaster. That’s the name given for a wall of corruption that ruins everything it touches. Or something like that. You see, Pass the Fear doesn’t let restart the game without manually deleting your data. But to be far, the details of a magical catastrophe isn’t needed. Environmental details like a theremin-filed soundtrack and a palette filed with inky blacks and deep violets help shape the premise. If you have even a bit of experience with the action roguelike genre they’ll you’ll know the formula: survive as long as you can, get stronger, and start all over again.

Watching My Enemies Burn (or Just Melt)

While Pass the Fear passes on motivation, it doubles down on its build system. After clearing rooms and bosses, you’ll get dividends like guns, augmentations, that change how weapons behave, relics and tarot cards for passive buffs. Like most bullet-hell roguelikes, the fun comes from pushing those selections to absurd extremes. Much of the enjoyment stems from weapon variety. You’ll begin runs with a modest pea-shooter. But before long, you’ll have an arsenal of weaponry with attachments that strength the barrel, applying cumulate acid, fire, or ice damage.

Pass the Fear has a better than average gun diversity, offering everything from exploding bullets to scorpion tails you have to physically catch to reload faster. But best of all, you’re not just selecting upgrades that supply a near-imperceptible state boost. You’re chasing down the perfect combination that breaks the game wide open. For better or worse, Pass the Fear seldom lets you find it but you feel reasonably powerful in the process.

A Whole Lot of Firepower in a Small Space

But that’s not to say that the game’s firefights will hold you’re attention across the long haul. While there are plenty of environmental objects that can protect you from hordes that assault you with bullet storms, the rooms themselves are small and rather generic. And for a genre that thrives on randomness, Pass the Fear’s runs can feel too consistent.

You’ll fight the same bosses in the same order on every run. The upside is that you can study and master their attack patterns the way you would in a more scripted action game. But you’ll sacrifice the “what am I walking into this time” thrill that makes games like this one replayable. It’s a balance that doesn’t always mesh with the multitude of different builds that Fear provides you. Before long you’ll discover that the difficulty spike of the game’s third act will crush characters who aren’t cultivated properly. While the additional help of a coop partner might seem to provide some with a solution, I found the experience was plagued by lag and stutter.

Fearing a Reliance on Formula?

Pass the Fear‘s metagame upgrades give a sense of progression, even if the process isn’t too imaginative. Currency earned during expeditions can be invested into permanent character talents and unlockables that gradually expands your character building options. Sure, the system provides a satisfying sense of forward momentum, but it doesn’t offers much deviation from its roguelike peers. You’ll habitually emerge from a failed run just a little stronger than before, yet many of these upgrades feel more like incremental stat bumps than anything that keeps you hooked.

Pass the Fear is a game of two halves. As a randomized roguelike for the first two boss battles, there’s a welcome amount of autonomy and variety as you shape your build. But the as a bullet-hell shooter, there’s not much more than using your arsenal for a repetitive cycle of reloading, unloading a magazine, before returning to cover. Coupled with a slower sense of discover as you begin to master the same procession of bosses, the title ultimately caps how much time you’ll want to sink into it.

Pass the Fear was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.