Scar-Lead Salvation Review – Missing More Than Memories

Scar-Lead Salvation on PS5

I’ve been playing the Neptunia series for what feels like forever now, so I’m a big Idea Factory fan. I was excited when I saw the developers who make some of my favourite JRPGs would be making something different. That doubled up when the game they were making was a third-person shooter roguelike that took clear inspiration from Returnal, which I loved. While it sure does take inspiration from Housemarque’s hit, the end product of Scar-Lead Salvation doesn’t compare even a little bit.

In the game, you play as Willow, an amnesiac woman who wakes up from a pod in a mysterious facility without knowing how she got there. After a forced death, she awakens again. This time, a self-identified Military AI makes contact, but it doesn’t have any light to shed on who Willow actually is or how she’s here.

As far as environment design goes for the facility, it’s abysmal. You’re looking at the same walls, rooms, and hallways the whole game. The only difference is that later sections have some sort of additional effects, but it’s a thin facade with the exact same pieces underneath it all. It’s like being trapped in a psychiatric hospital, forced to look at only the same walls. Even if that was the game’s big reveal, it still doesn’t make actually suffering through the game worth it.

On a technical level, Scar-Lead Salvation is a fine game. The shooting is basic, but fine, and the movement is honestly decent. Having played both the PS4 and PS5 versions, I find the PS5 experience to be incredibly superior and smooth with moving and aiming. It actually made me like the game a little more.

However, it’s wrapped in the most monotonous gameplay I could imagine. Every floor is just one linear path; there’s nothing besides empty hallways and rooms that either have robots or a small assortment of boxes for equipment. There is the odd teleporter as you progress, but it either takes you to one of four possible small rooms with weapons/health boxes or a large monster-filled challenge room where the rewards are never worth it.

There are three kinds of boxes. The grey ones drop heals and increase your boost gauge, the red ones drop weapons, and the blue ones give Exo skills. Most of these rooms are simple, but others make you work more with laser gates. Some of them even put the lasers through the item boxes. While that’s fine for the grey boxes where you just have to get in and get out before they activate, it’s worse with the others. Trying to look at Exo Skills in the short window before taking damage is awful. Those instances weren’t super common, but it didn’t make the game any less frustrating.

My other big complaint about Scar-Lead Salvation is that it’s also painfully easy for far too long. After the scripted death, I breezed all the way up the third boss without much difficulty, but didn’t consider the real cost of losing a run. Dying means having to do some portion/floor of this game over again just for the sake of it. There are teleporters at the start to take you back to whichever section you want, but you still have to run the whole thing.

There aren’t any shortcuts, though the game does one thing I thought was weird: you aren’t locked into the rooms with enemies. You can just easily beeline to the next door and keep going. The doors shut behind you so quickly that it’s extremely rare any attacks make it through. There are certain rooms that you need to actually fight enemies to make a jump pad spawn, but they aren’t constant. The only downside to skipping rooms is not getting money you might need later for upgrades/consumables.

Upon a restart, you are only given a level one version of the starter rifle, but you at least get to keep your passive Exo Skills at the same level you had them. These are things like more max health, more ranged damage, or more ammo, meaning more damage output before you need to reload. These can be upgraded all the way up to level 10, though there’s not always a huge gap between base and max.

Weapons can be levelled up or found at higher levels as well, but it’s harder to pin down how they work, as the stats feel extremely vague and arbitrary in Scar-Lead Salvation. Every single one is presented as only a line. What do the lines mean, you ask? I have no clue. Even just showing how much damage I’m doing would’ve made a world of difference. Instead, all there is to go on is the time to kill.

Willow starts out running in her full armour, and it is capable of tanking hits. But, how many that is is a mystery. Sometimes it will block an attack, other times it doesn’t. All the damage leads to the armour (and then her clothing) being torn up in a way that just felt gratuitous and incredibly inconsistent. It could have been my overall frustration and boredom with the game, but by the time Willow’s underwear was a fixture on my screen, I was just annoyed.

If you’re willing to sink yet more time into running the same floors before boss areas, there is a portal to take you back to the beginning of the game while keeping everything. Here, you can use a handy (and free) machine to repair all armour and refill your health. While that is a nice idea, you then have to survive the whole floor all over again until you reach the boss. It’s useful if you arrive and don’t feel you can beat the boss, but why not have that in the room instead of the beginning? Running these floors is already awful, don’t make me do it more just because.

Scar-Lead Salvation was clearly made with a decent idea in mind, but an obvious unwillingness to put significant developmental resources into it to actually make it special. You’re left with horrifically bland environments, same-y enemies, and a gameplay loop that you will instantly understand and most likely hate. There’s just not enough game here, let alone anything to justify the US$60 price tag. My lasting impression was that I felt like I was playing a demo for a future, more substantial game, and that’s already pushing it.

Scar-Lead Salvation will be available on May 29 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.