A flying alien with a UFO’s worth of swagger and zero interest in walking has just landed in Dark Scrolls. Meet Saturn, the latest addition to the roguelite’s growing roster of quirky heroes, and proof that developer Goblin Tools has saved the strangest character designs for last.
Saturn joins a cast that already includes a saxophone-playing rat, yet somehow manages to out-weird that premise. The little alien arrives fully armed with a machine gun and rides in its own UFO, a departure from the sword-swinging, spell-casting archetypes that dominate the genre. It’s the kind of off-the-wall character design that signals Dark Scrolls isn’t taking itself too seriously, even as it demands sharp reflexes and split-second decisions from players navigating procedurally generated runs of hand-crafted rooms and levels.
The game fuses shmup-style chaos with roguelite progression and cooperative play, allowing you to unlock nine distinctive heroes total, each with unique skills and customizable trinkets that alter gameplay. Saturn’s machine gun presumably fits into that arsenal of varying attack styles, though specifics on the alien’s abilities remain sparse. Players chain perks and elemental powers through combat performance to unlock screen-filling destruction of arcade legend proportions.
Dark Scrolls supports solo and cooperative play, local and online, across both single-player and duo runs. Saturn’s arrival suggests the developer is continuing to expand the hero roster with increasingly unexpected character archetypes, keeping the game’s charm factor high even as difficulty scales.