Pass the Fear Review — Witchhunt

Pass the Fear is a roguelike bullet-hell game set somewhere between fantasy and modernity, brushing up against the edge of steampunk but still retaining some very potent medieval fantasy vibes as you wield elemental-infused firearms against hordes of mutated beasts, demons, and godlike beings. A small cast of heroes comes together to smash through a witch’s curse and save the land before catastrophe engulfs it, stuck in something of a time loop that resets on each defeat.

That is, at least, my best approximation of the story. For everything Pass the Fear has going for it, the game’s English localization is not the best. Perhaps it’s just a personal issue of mine, but I often find that less-than-stellar English translations of certain languages, especially Simplified Chinese, lead to dialogue that is difficult to decipher, and I tend to zone out trying to read it. It just creates a sort of fog where I can kind of understand what is being said, but I struggle to fully comprehend what I’m reading. Some effort was made to make a narrative connection to the game’s roguelike mechanics, but that effort was made in short bursts that I struggled to understand, so I couldn’t really tell you what it was.

That being said, the localization didn’t affect my ability to enjoy the cast of characters, who each had visually distinct personalities and character traits that were much easier to decipher in their short interactions. Even the main character, who seems to be “default” to a comical extent with his literal bucket helmet, was someone I came to appreciate without too much effort.

Another area that is hardly interrupted by the localization is the core of the gameplay, which plays as a pretty simple bullet-hell shooter with roguelike progression. Said progression mostly comes in the way of new weapons, each of which can be augmented with a barrel modification that gives sometimes small, sometimes very meaningful changes to how the weapon functions. Finding each weapon and barrel mod combo is fun at first, but the game lacks somewhat in variety, which can quickly make the process repetitive. Different weapons and mods are also simply not made equal, with certain powerups being significantly more impactful than others. Still, the right build can be pretty fun to use. I became fond of using the hard-hitting revolver with a mod that not only gave me increased critical damage scaling with how much money I kept in my pocket, but equipped me with a high-damage alternate fire that gave me coins on kills.

While the gameplay at its best is fun, the scaling and pacing throughout Pass the Fear leave something to be desired. There is a noticeable jump in difficulty between each act, with the early game being so easy that it can be pretty boring; each stage is filled with a handful or fewer enemies that die incredibly quickly, while later stages artificially increase the difficulty simply by buffing up the health of enemies. The game at its worst can feel like a trek through a boring grindfest designed only to give you a chance to roll the best gear, followed by a painful slog through the same or similar enemies with inflated health bars.

The best part of the game is certainly the boss fights, where both the strongest elements of the game’s art style and combat design are on full display. The bosses are interesting, albeit not always tonally connected to the levels, in my opinion, and are the greatest test of your bullet-hell skills as they unleash screen-filling attack patterns. The boss fights felt like the best the game could be as far as difficulty scaling as well, presenting thoughtfully designed attack patterns and real punishment for the unaware player without feeling cheap. These segments have a good mixture of attention-demanding dodge phases and segments where you can dish the damage back out, and the bosses don’t feel overly bullet-spongy either. Clearing these stages always felt much more satisfying than any of the more difficult regular combat encounters, which is definitely something you should say about every boss fight, but it felt especially relevant here.

Not to sound like a broken record, but I once again found difficulty with the localization when it came to item descriptions. The effects of weapon and object pickups are muddled in thick, often multi-sentence or even paragraph-long descriptions that not only do a poor job of explaining exactly what a weapon does, but which I also found motivated me to skip reading entirely and just figure things out as I went. This isn’t an issue every player will face, but when confronted with the long strings of text on every item I picked up, paired with the fact that the language was often muddled and hard to understand anyway, it felt like an exhausting chore to sit there and compare each description against the others for every item I was presented with. This is definitely the area where readability matters the most, especially when you have combat segments that are shorter than the time it takes to read the rewards for defeating said combat.

Pass the Fear has some pretty standard, engaging bullet-hell gameplay with some great art and fun characters. The game works best in its boss fights, and can have some satisfying moments when you combine weapons and attachments to make a super gun. However, the gameplay struggles with balancing, both in its artificial and sudden difficulty curve and pacing, and its lackluster assortment of weapons and attachments, many of which you will skip over for much more obviously powerful and fun-to-use options. The game’s localization can prove to be something of a roadblock, especially when it comes to deciphering what items do, and more often than not I chose to simply play around and find out rather than process what the game was trying to tell me.

Still, the developers appear to be responding well to community feedback and implementing patches, so the title might be in a far different state than it is now. However, my first impression of the game remains that it was an at-times fun, but most other times boring or sluggish bullet-hell roguelike, with some good elements drowned in a lot of underwhelming ones.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Pass the Fear. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Pass the Fear is available on Steam.