Scarlet Tower (PC) Early Access Preview

Since Vampire Survivors took the world by storm last year, a lot of games have cropped up in the same Roguelite genre. Some people call them Horde Survival games, others call them Bullet Heavens because your character is the bullet hell rather than the other way around. Scarlet Tower borrows a fair bit from Vampire Survivors, but it does a few things differently and has its own visual identity that sets it apart.

As with Vampire Survivors, you play as one of (currently 7) characters, trying to survive 20 minutes against waves of enemies at increasing difficulties. In Scarlet Tower, the first half of each run takes place during the day, and you only get XP and Gold for killing enemies. As you might expect, XP allows you to level up and gain new weapons or passive abilities, as well as upgrade existing weapons. Once you max out two compatible weapons, they will fuse to become even more powerful.

Unlike in Vampire Survivors, you’ll be able to level up the fused weapon, making it even stronger. There are a variety of weapons to be found too. In fact, I’d say even at this Early Access stage, there are more weapons than in Vampire Survivors. Gold serves as a meta-progression currency, allowing you to upgrade your characters’ unique abilities, as well as your core stats. These upgrades are permanent, though you can also use Gold to level up Familiars, which provide other passive upgrades.

During the second half of the run, you’ll play at nighttime. At night, enemies are more vicious. However, you also gain Night Crystals, which serve as a different form of meta-currency that allow you to upgrade the glyphs on your characters’ unique abilities (think glyphs in Diablo 3) as well as the various factions (and faction-specific skill) your characters are tied to.

The progression systems in Scarlet Tower are surprisingly deep. Though I do wish the weapon fusions were visible in the pause menu. Also, each character’s primary weapon doesn’t have a fusion option yet, which is an oversight I hope is fixed before launch.

The environments are interesting, as there are actual obstacles to avoid or get stuck on as you’re trying to avoid enemies. It makes things more engaging rather than just looping crowds of enemies while you try to get stronger.

As you beat each level, you’ll gain the opportunity to raise the corruption level, which gets you more rewards but makes the level harder. The day and night cycle makes things more strategic, as you might want to level up quickly during the day and set yourself up so that you survive more easily at night.

Scarlet Tower has a lot of room to grow. I’m not sure how much longer the dev plans to keep it in Early Access, but hopefully, some of the quality-of-life additions will be added before then. The developer also plans to add more characters, which is good since two of the factions (Vampire and Demon) only have one playable character in them.

If you like Vampire Survivors, give Scarlet Tower a try. It lacks some of Vampire Survivors’ tongue-in-cheek humor, but it brings gorgeous graphics and a few fun ideas to the table. Also, it’s only $4.99, so you aren’t putting in that big of an investment. I look forward to seeing how the game improves as we get closer to its full release.

A PC Early Access review copy of Scarlet Tower was provided by Pyxeralia LLC for this review.