The bullet hell genre has probably suffered the most from the emergence of bullet heaven and Survivors-likes. Given how both look to fill the screen with projectiles, it’s hard to separate the two concepts, even if one is the inverse of the other. As fun as bullet heaven is, there’s a joy to dodging a million projectiles over the course of a single run that I don’t think ever really gets old, though you do need good mechanics outside of that to make it all work.
Pass the Fear layers on roguelike progression, giving you a choice of what kind of rewards you want through a run. Do you go for guns, gun augments to give them different abilities, or relics and tarot cards for their passive buffs? Your main aim is to min-max so hard that you can obliterate everything in a couple of hits, and when you inevitably die, you upgrade your account with squad points to improve health, or armour, or something else.
The gun system is a lot of fun. While the standard gamepaly is either holding the button to shoot or to charge a shot, you get different elements to play with, a lot of weird and wonderful methods, like air bullets which constantly explode or scorpion tails you have to catch to reload faster. There’s a great mixture of ideas here, but I definitely found my preferences after a few runs and started to miss being able to unlock new options in the loot pool, as you’d find in other games.
You do get a fair few characters though, and they all have their own skill trees as part of a squad-wide meta progression. I like that you can swap the skills on these as you want, letting you try out different builds at the start of each run. It adds a bit more variety, and that’s good, because variety is not Pass the Fear’s strongest point. Most builds end up feeling quite similar, even if the building blocks you use to make them are not.
On the subject of variety, every boss is set in stone. You fight the same bosses in the same order every single run. It means you get to learn their move sets, which is a big deal, but it also means that you don’t get the same excitement as in a lot of other roguelikes with rotating and randomised bosses. It’s still fun, for sure, but Pass the Fear isn’t a roguelike you can play for hundreds of hours, at least not for me.
There is co-op though, although it was in beta during the review period. Co-op always adds many more hours to a game for me, so it’s a great inclusion here.
