Doinksoft’s Dark Scrolls turns classic fantasy tropes into a chaotic co-op roguelike platformer, backed by Devolver Digital and packed with nine bizarre heroes, shmup-style action, and endlessly remixable dungeons.
Dark Scrolls is the kind of pitch that sounds almost obvious once you hear it: take the tightly tuned 2D action of Gunbrella and Gato Roboto, shove it into a side-scrolling fantasy dungeon crawl, then light a fuse of shmup chaos and roguelike progression. That mix is exactly what Doinksoft is chasing with its newly revealed “dungeon scroller,” published by Devolver Digital and coming to PC and Nintendo Switch.
Rather than another po-faced, lore-heavy fantasy epic, Dark Scrolls leans into the sillier side of the genre. Doinksoft describes it as “a fantasy randomly generated dungeon game that y’all are gonna call a roguelike and then argue about what that even means,” which sets the tone right away. This is a run-based, loot-slinging platformer that wants you to laugh as much as you min-max.
Structurally, Dark Scrolls is a side-scrolling action platformer built around procedurally generated dungeons. Each descent through the depths is different, stitched together from randomized rooms, branching paths, and surprise encounters. You are always moving to the right, fighting off swarms of enemies while juggling jumps, dodges, and a dizzying amount of projectiles. Doinksoft and Devolver both highlight the game’s “shmup-style chaos,” and the screen-filling bullet patterns in the reveal footage put it closer to Contra and Metal Slug than a traditional measured dungeon crawl.
That kind of chaos could easily tip into noise, which is where the roguelike progression steps in. Between runs you unlock upgrades, discover new weapons and artifacts, and gradually expand the pool of things that can appear on subsequent attempts. That ever-growing toolbox helps keep failure interesting, just as in Hades or Dead Cells, but delivered inside a horizontal dungeon that looks like it fell out of a late-90s cartridge.
Dark Scrolls is built as a co-op experience first and foremost, and it is here that it starts to stand apart from much of the current roguelike crowd. The game supports both local and online co-op, with up to four players sharing the same side-scrolling space. This is not a case of tethered drop-in teammates who might as well be ghosts. Collaborating players are meant to collide, complement, and occasionally sabotage each other.
The dungeons are studded with hazards and enemy patterns that clearly gain teeth when more players are on screen. Dodging a boss’s sweeping beam or a room full of projectiles gets frantic the moment your partners are leaping through the same tight windows. The level design is full of narrow platforms and pinch points, encouraging you to think not only about your own pathing, but how you are positioning relative to your friends. Revival and support mechanics make communication valuable, turning a chaotic run into a scrappy little raid if your group leans in.
Crucially, the co-op is not locked to couch sessions. Online support means that Dark Scrolls can function just as well as a quick nightly run with distant friends as it does a party game with a shared TV. That flexibility matters a lot for a game leaning this hard into collaboration. Rogueish repetition hits different when you are wiping, learning, and eventually conquering with the same crew.
If co-op is the spine, the character lineup is the personality. Dark Scrolls launches with nine playable heroes, each riffing on a fantasy archetype and then twisting it just enough to feel like a Doinksoft creation. There is the obligatory thief, because of course there is, covering your expectations of speed, daggers, and double jumps. Beside them are staples like knights, mages, and cleric-adjacent support types, forming a familiar grid of roles that make instant sense in a co-op party.
Then you get to the weirder picks. One of the immediate standouts is “Rat with saxophone,” a character that sounds like the punchline to an in-studio joke and yet suits Doinksoft’s whole vibe perfectly. The inclusion of a tiny rodent jazz musician as a full-fledged hero tells you a lot about the tone the team is aiming for. Even as you are threading bullet curtains and scraping past death, the game is not taking itself fully seriously.
The weapon pool backs that up. Dark Scrolls showers players with axes, arrows, knives, magic and, occasionally, thrown steaks. You are just as likely to pelt a skeleton with hunks of meat as you are to snipe it with a crossbow. Run-based modifiers and dropped artifacts stack on top of your base kit, mutating simple classes into strange builds from one dungeon to the next. A straightforward melee fighter might pick up splashy explosives and become an accidental grief machine for their teammates, while the rat saxophonist could end up applying buffs and debuffs that make co-op synergy hilariously opaque in the best way.
That sense of personality and oddness has been Doinksoft’s calling card since Gato Roboto. The studio has built a reputation for sharp, compact action games that pick a single idea and then worry it to perfection. Gato Roboto took Metroid’s structure and filtered it through a lo-fi, one-bit cat-in-a-mech premise. Gunbrella mashed together a parry-heavy action platformer with a rain-soaked noir revenge tale. Both games were brief, dense, and polished, with movement and combat that felt immediately satisfying.
Dark Scrolls looks like a deliberate expansion of that design philosophy. Rather than another mostly solo adventure with intricate level layouts, the team is stepping into a more systemic, replayable space. Roguelike dungeon structure, randomized loot, and heavy co-op support change how you design encounters. Instead of sculpted, bespoke sequences, you need combat arenas that can survive thousands of permutations and accommodate wildly different party compositions. Coming from the exacting, handcrafted feel of their past games, it will be fascinating to see how Doinksoft translates that precision into something inherently messy and replay-driven.
That is part of why Devolver’s backing matters here. The publisher has a long history of pairing with teams that push specific action subgenres forward, particularly in the roguelike and co-op space. Think of how Enter the Gungeon and Cult of the Lamb each took familiar frameworks and twisted them into something stranger and more stylish. Dark Scrolls fits neatly into that tradition. It immediately reads as a Devolver joint, from the chaotic pixel art and punchy animation to the wry marketing copy about arguments over the definition of “roguelike.”
Devolver’s involvement also, practically, gives Doinksoft room to stretch without losing that weird edge. A game that hinges on matchmaking, online co-op, and long-tailed replayability lives or dies on post-launch support. A publisher with experience nurturing cult hits into communities is a good sign for anyone hoping Dark Scrolls grows into a game they dip back into over months rather than a weekend fling.
Beneath the jokes and the rat jazz, there is a clear design throughline for why this project is worth watching. Doinksoft has already proved it can make movement feel tactile and weapons satisfying. Those are table stakes for a shmup-heavy platformer. The new challenge is rhythm. Can the studio pace hour-long co-op sessions, design progression hooks that bring people back after a bad run, and keep a nine-character roster feeling distinct across hundreds of dungeons? The potential upside if they pull it off is significant. A tight, chaotic, co-op-friendly roguelike that actually respects your time and plays beautifully would slot neatly into the weekly rotation of a lot of groups.
For now, Dark Scrolls is targeting a release on PC and Nintendo Switch this year, with a Steam page already live for wishlisting. The reveal trailer shows a confident snapshot of what Doinksoft is aiming for: fast side-scrolling action, screens full of colorful projectiles, a party of misfit heroes leaping through every mess together, and a tone that never forgets that fantasy can be funny. As a next step for the studio, it is ambitious without feeling out of character.
If you bounced off more po-faced roguelites or find traditional dungeon crawlers a bit slow, Dark Scrolls could be the game that makes you care about loot and runs again. Keep an eye on how Doinksoft talks about co-op systems and long-term progression over the coming months. The dungeon scroller idea is simple. The real magic will be in how well this team that previously made you care about a cat in a mech suit can now make you and three friends live and die over a rat with a saxophone.