Scarygirl Review

If you’re not familiar with Scarygirl then you probably haven’t read the graphic novel the game is based on. Nathan Jurevicius is the man behind the curtains controlling the brand and while I’ve always been a fan of his work I was never that big into the comic itself. Square Enix decided to give this guy his own game based off his comic and that’s how the Scarygirl game got started.

Scarygirl
Developer: TikGames
Price: $10
Platform: PC, PS3 (reviewed), and XBLA

Once you start the game you’re introduced to Scarygirl who is an abandoned girl who was found by Blister, a giant intelligent octopus. Scarygirl begins to have nightmares about a mysterious bearded man and the only person who can give her any advise on it is a mystical kung-fu rabbit called Bunniguru. He tells you the man can be found in a far off city, so Scarygirl sets off to discover the truth behind her nightmares. You’ll travel through gorgeous envrionments that vary from sewers, lush forests, ice caves, a bouncing club, and more all done in Jurevicius’ signature style.

Scarygirl offers some neat level design with some interesting perspective changes that keep things a little fresh while you venture through the 21 different levels. Each environment has its own set of environmental hazards, unique enemies, and visual flair. Some levels also feature multiple paths that you can take with some paths focusing on platforming and others on combat. You don’t necessarily need to think too hard on which path you want to take since they both reach the same destination so you can just go back to the other path once you finish the other. Once you finish a level you’ll be scored on your performance based on deaths, enemy kills, gems collected and more. It’s not that difficult to get a perfect score, you’ll just have to take care to pick everything up in a level and make sure not to die of course. Gems can be collected to purchase new moves, weapons, and ‘trophies’ of defeated enemies from Cthulhu an Octopus monster thing. Everything seems decently priced so you’ll be able to buy what you want when you get to a store with most levels netting you at least 200 gems, but the main issue is that the store only shows up a few times throughout the game with no way to get to it except replaying a level. By the time I got close to the final stages I had only encountered the store *maybe* 4 times in the 21 stages. I went quite a few levels with hundreds of gems in my wallet before I found a store, it’s really surprising that they wouldn’t at least put a store in the interactive main menu so that we didn’t have to replay stages to find it.

As with any platformer there’s some combat to be had in it and while Scarygirl looks cute swatting enemies with her tentacle arm, the combat just isn’t that fun. You have a light and heavy attack; the light is your faster/spammable move and your heavy is really your juggle move that you’ll use to knock enemies into the air. Once enemies have been hit enough you’ll notice a purple aura around them indicating that they’ve been stunned and can be grabbed. Once you grab an enemy you can use their body to slam them into things, throw them, siphon their health into yourself, or use one of the various moves you can buy in the shop such as using them as a pogo stick. There is a block button and you counter perform counter attacks on any enemy with ranged attacks which will send their projectile right back at them. Scarygirl has a rage meter that slowly fills up each time you attack an enemy and once activated allows you to perform devastating attacks for a few seconds. The effects when you use this are neat, but it felt ultimately useless since even with the rage upgrade it still fills up a bit too slow to be worth using. Since bosses have phases that means once you activate it you only get to pull off one hit (since it does 10x the damage your regular attacks do) which sends the boss to their next phase. It’s never really feels useful since what you do in 1 attack can be done in 4 or 5 with your regular whip and you always have enough to time attack the boss enough to take out the required amount of health to go to the next phase of the battle.

There are around half a dozen different weapons you can purchase from totally not Cthulhu that affect how you play, but only 3 of them will see any use. You’ve got your 3 combat modifiers: an anchor for slower but more powerful attacks (instead of the regular 5 it does 10), a fan for faster but weaker attacks (I think it does 1-3), and a whip that just increases the amount of rage you get. Since the combat itself is ass there really was no reason at all to use anything other than the anchor since it still hits fast enough to kill your enemies quickly. The other whips are more environment modifiers: a leaf to increase the duration of your glide, a magnet that draws gems towards you, and a fish that increases your speed underwater. The leaf and fish are definitely what you want to focus on getting early on since, besides being cheap, they’ll really help you out with the platforming later in the game. The magnet is nice, but I never had any issue with getting the gems, so I’d just recommend to somebody who’s incredibly lazy. Weapons can be switched quickly with the directional buttons.

The Final Word
A gorgeous art style with neat level design hides a very basic and average platformer. With its 4+ hour campaign and re-playability to collect all the vinyls or perfect their scores, Scarygirl will last you quite a while for your money. I will have to say I find it hard to recommend this to some people though; it’s a decent platformer but it does nothing interesting to warrant a purchase to anyone but fans of the graphic novel or platformer enthusiasts.

– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average