Steam Curator

I’m starting to think we need a new word for these things: because what slapping “survivors” onto the end of the title won’t signify is the extent to which build variety is a core game focus.

It isn’t one for Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors, and that sting is a little sharper for an IP with such an explicit RPG lineage. That’s not for lack of want, either: there are a lot of mid-run attacks to decide between, inter-run talents to unlock, and passive upgrades you’ll be picking from on your quest to defeat Tar-Baphon. But the way that Gallowspire packages these decisions up often removes agency from you, and results in runs that feel autopiloted and uneventful.

There is still a competent game of power escalation, beautiful style, and readable survivors action here, but it is undermined by meta progression that takes way too long to get interesting and a complete lack of mid-run build variety.

Gallowspire Survivors carves its runs into discrete floors within discrete sections of an evil Tower. Each floor will see you flooded with enemies, you ensure that your auto-attacking team of two has enough stats to overcome those enemies by picking new powers every time you level up, proceed until you’ve beaten all floors and all bosses within the tower. Repeat infinitely across different difficulty settings and different characters. A few minutes into Gallowspire and I was convinced this would be the next one that sucked me in: the next Survivors I pledge a week of my life towards, but it only took a few minutes thereafter to become clear why I wouldn’t be doing that.

Despite executing the broad strokes of this genre well, it makes some really weird choices in how it dolls out powers to you. Choices that will sound really nitpicky and minute on paper, but in practice they end up negatively coloring the entire build-crafting process.

Currently, there are two sources of mid-run power: level-ups, which you get from killing enough mobs and grabbing the experience orbs they drop, and chests: which are what keep you on the move across the map.

They both share the same scaling problem in the sense that you only get four active slots and four passive slots, with every other chest and level up thereafter just giving numerical increases to the powers you already have. It means that over the course of a half hour run, you’ve made your most significant decisions within the first three minutes and the remaining 27 are just the prescribed execution of whatever you’ve already committed to.

The game needs some sort of tertiary power system that’s more flexible mid-run, something that may demand you pivot a build or even just add some excitement: the fact that your power ups fall into your typical grey to orange rarity tiers lacks the punch that color scheme usual denotes thanks to the fact that they’re all just numerical increases to the same stuff you already have. A legendary drop will never be an inspiring pickup, just further acceleration along a path you were already on.

But beyond just lacking the fundamentals of rogue-excitement, these same rarity tiers damn the game in other ways.

Leveling presents you with four options: in the very early game you’ll pick between new actives and new passives until you fill our your eight slots, but for the majority of a run you’ll just be picking between upgrades to your existing powers. Frequently one or more of those four choices will have a higher rarity associated with it, and therein lies the problem: there’s almost no reason to not just auto-pick the highest rarity every time, especially when you consider your late game build will have everything maxed out anyway.

It turns the decisions into which upgrades do you prioritize rather than which do you pick, and if that’s the case the choice is practically made for you: pick any legendary, epic, or rare that is presented.

That extends to the chests as well: rather than being a singular choice among four, you roll a dice and will get more upgrades automatically the higher you roll… but seeing as how these are all small percentage increases to your existing powers, even a perfect 20 won’t have you walking away feeling any more powerful than you were before you opened the chest.

Make no mistake: those upgrades add up, and the late-game experience does have you feel like this screen-clearing god when you get there, the problem is how little your inputs actually matter on getting to that conclusion.

It’s a shame because Gallowspire gets so much right in the periphery: meta-progression, despite taking too long to warm up, does eventually get there: there are powers on the talent tree that change how you play the game, like the Wizard’s scaling damage increase the longer they stand in a singular location. The spell and weapon effects are as weighty as they are pretty, there’s some thoughtful polish considerations in here like the fact that opening a chest doesn’t count towards the timer that pushes you towards the next floor, and there’s even focus put into areas I wouldn’t have expected of this genre: like distinct boss encounters with mechanics and phases akin to a traditional action game boss instead of just being stat sticks.

But with the backbone of the game being frequent upgrades and those upgrades being as dull as they are, it’s hard for the aspects of this game that are good to really shine.

I’m typically pretty careful about not turning my reviews into armchair wishlists: better to review the game for what it is rather than what I think it should be. But with Gallowspire being in early access and feedback collection being a cited goal of the devs in this process, I wanted to share some layups that I think could make the game more engaging. Firstly, I would decrease the frequency of higher rarity options upon level up but I would shift that power into instead making the entire level choice the same rarity; rather than having legendary selections competing with common ones, you’ll ocassionally just get an all legendary level up or an all epic level up, and can pick between powers of similar strength. Having mixed rarity drops in the same selection really only made sense in games like Brotato because they had a higher price tag: without an economy to manage, it doesn’t really make sense for it to not be this way.

I would apply this same change to chests but I would also increase their rarity across the board, both to distinguish them from level ups a bit more and turn them into consequential thresholds on your build path. I would also make it so that instead of the diceroll determining how many upgrades you’ll get, it will determine how many upgrades you get to pick FROM. It keeps the tabletop flavor of dicerolling and the excitement of hitting a D20, while also giving you more autonomy in the result and the ability to move your build into particular directions…rather than just passively acceptinig this aggregate mushy jack of all trades power increase like the current implementation expects.

There are lots of paths forward, and I hope Pathfinder finds the right one for it. It nails the digital laser lightshow and numbers-go-up escalating fun, but without mapping those to any strategy, it feels hollow. It’s not hitting with me and it's not due to lack of content, but due to how its existing content is made null and repetitive from misses in those upgrade systems. In its current state, it’s a game with lots of decisions but not lots of choice.

I’m rooting for Gallowspire Survivors despite the fact that I can’t currently recommend it. With attention into the right areas, it could come out of its Early Access Period as a game with meaningful power customization and interesting loot choices… instead of just roleplaying as one.