Scarf Review

Scarf is a 3D adventure game that favors platforming and puzzle solving over combat. That’s usually right up my alley, but Scarf takes too many missteps for me to give it a recommendation. It’s a shame, too, because I don’t think it would take much to fix this game. Simply making the hero run a little faster and jump a little higher would already help tremendously. I was holding the run button down for the entire game, and it still didn’t feel like I was moving very fast. You do get a double jump early on, too, but that just means you end up over relying on it for even the smallest of steps and gaps. They also need to break the levels up. There are only three levels in the game, and they are loooooong. This kills any incentive I have to backtrack and find missed collectibles, because you have to play the entire level again with all skills reset.

Despite not liking the controls and level structure, I was still tempted to replay levels for those elusive collectibles, though. These items mostly boil down to art and cutscenes, but they complement the story at large. Sure, Scarf isn’t that heavy on story, but the bits of lore you do get are interesting. I appreciate the world that they’ve built here. It looks amazing, after all. But that’s the third issue with Scarf: it’s graphically not optimized. I have a decent gaming rig and was playing on the lowest settings, and the game still chugged and stuttered at times. I won’t even pretend to know how to fix that, and maybe it can’t be fixed. But if the controls and scope of the levels were ironed out, I’d feel much better about giving this a thumbs up, even if it continues to run a little janky.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.