Scroll the Pain Away

Scroll the Pain Away’s gameplay focuses on crafting scrolls to help customers of a magic shop with their life issues. This is done by selecting a combination of up to four glyphs (or five in some cases) from the 24 available, then drawing them with your mouse on the scroll paper. Considering that there are hundreds of possibilities, there will be multiple solutions possible for each customer, and your work will be rated based on how close to a correct solution you are. All your attempts are recorded on a Notes app on your phone, together with the customer’s rating, some hints on how to improve the spell or ideas on how to twist it in mischievous ways.

Scroll the Pain Away’s mechanics are a mixed bag. In some aspects, these mechanics are too complex, while in other aspects the game may seem lackluster. The protagonist is stuck in a time loop, meaning that you will be replaying the same day over and over again. In each new instance, you will be visited by the same set of eight customers and they will have the same requests. On the one hand, this adds a lot of redundancy, on the other hand, this allows you to perfect the scrolls that you give them. Depending on what combination of glyphs you pick, you will have a different response from that character. While a lot of effort has been put into creating plenty of optional dialogues with your customers and unique outcomes for each meaningful combination of glyphs, their feedback is not immediate. You will be able to see the effect of your scrolls (the characters’ rating and their comments) only after you finish the day and start a new instance of it (essentially after getting through the whole set of characters). To speed this up a bit, you can customize your day by selecting only certain characters to appear on that day. However, I noticed that at least certain Steam achievements, if not all, are disabled in this Custom mode.

For me, the biggest pain point of the game was drawing the glyphs and making the game detect them correctly based on my drawing. The glyph artwork is too complex to be comfortably reproduced with the mouse. Some of these glyphs have a lot of curved or angled parts. A glyph has to be drawn with a single, uninterrupted (continuous) stroke and this makes it difficult to reproduce the symbol accurately. Do you recall the struggle of drawing something by hand using the mouse in Paint? Well, imagine doing that for every glyph, over and over again until the game understands what you want to draw (sometimes it might even confuse it with some other glyph). Your drawings have to be as accurate as possible, but even then, the game fails to detect them much more often than it succeeds, and in the end, it just shows an “Invalid” message. Drawing them in small sizes requires even more precision (with even more detection issues), while drawing them as big symbols on top of each other makes the lines overlap and be indistinguishable from one another because they are all drawn with the same color (there’s also no info on what glyphs are drawn on the scroll so far). The resulting drawing is a jumbled mess of lines that looks like the squiggles of an angry kid. On the upside, some of the glyphs add very nice animated effects to your screen.

All in all, I feel like the ideas and effort put into designing the game are both great, although they could be much more user-friendly than they are now. Simpler shapes, differently colored strokes based on the glyph type, perhaps even showing a guide for the selected glyph on the scroll area (for example a semi-transparent line) to facilitate drawing them, immediate rating feedback from the customer – all of these are things I’d really like to see implemented and they could considerably improve the user experience. Due to the time loop design, the game might also appear as a mere prototype for players to build upon, especially since it features a Steam workshop where others can create their own characters, dialogues and outcomes.

Crafting magical scrolls for your customers is only half of what the game offers. The other half is a pretty creative arcade minigame revolving around making connections between glyphs and optimizing these chains before destroying them for points with one click. It’s a pretty difficult one to master, and playing it in various ways is required to obtain several achievements. One of the main issues is that the minigame is playable only on the protagonist’s phone, which has the downside of being restricted to the phone’s narrow screen. This means that you have to constantly drag the game’s area in all directions to even see what’s happening – all of this under a timer. Once again, the idea behind it is innovative, yet the implementation could have been done in a more comfortable way for the player. The minigame could for example be maximized to a full screen after it starts.

Essentially, Scroll the Pain Away is a “find the developer’s solution” kind of game, but compared to other similar games, it fires up your creativity with how many combinations of glyphs are possible, while also giving you a nudge in the right direction through the hints found in your Notes app. The concept is fun, yet the implementation could be improved with many QoL features. The character interactions are also enjoyable, although at times the protagonist may appear impolite or arrogant in her replies. I would have liked for her answers to contain some wizardry wisdom or more depth, but since she’s just a novice apprentice, this might not entirely fit the character. The developers chose to portray her in a more realistic manner, as a person who struggles with paying rent on time, maintaining a work-life balance, and trying to help others but not being able to help herself through her spells.