Quick Review: Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom

“This game ain’t too bad, it’s got just one screen!” The screen:

Spikes. Spikes every-friggin'-where.

Made by Janius Digital and released on June 1st, 2021, Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom (awesome name) is yet another sweet throwback to retro classics. The twist, as I already revealed, is that everything happens on a single screen. The game is still split in “levels”; it’s just that they’re all connected with each other as a continuous piece. Each “level” has a feel and a musical track of its own, and each one introduces a new type of hazard. You only need the arrows or WASD to move, and can press Z to zoom in to see the level in detail, or zoom out to see how far you still are from the goal. Most of the screen is pitch-black at first, and new areas appear on the screen as you reach them. You can even teleport between save points with F in some game modes.

Let's see... pop-up spikes, circling lasers, spinning blades,
oh and the platforms fold under Scoot's feet so he can't stay
on them, AND the ceiling is too damn low.

The difficulty is what sets it apart. I like to call this type of game a Meat Grinder, or maybe a Kaizo, as an homage to either Super Meat Boy or Kaizo Mario. You know the type; insanely brutal video games where the dangers are so frequent, and constant, that you’ll be lucky if you finish an early level without losing a life, and later ones without dying several dozen times. True to form, Scoot Kaboom tracks the number of times you died during a playthrough. I ended my run with over 1,000 deaths. What bothers me perhaps even more with this type of game is the pixel perfection that’s required to get through some of the hazards; a single mistake means you have to start the whole section over. At points, you have no margin for error.

Sure enough, several sections involve jumps where Scoot Kaboom, the little lizard you control at first, literally has no space at all to jump; the ceiling is low and, as a result, Scoot hits the ceiling (see image). Problem is, the solid platforms vanish from under him, AND there are spinning blades between the platforms. That's beyond sadistic. I easily died over 100 times in that section alone.

Not that sections prior to that are any easier, really.

Look, I don’t want to harp on this game or its kin of ultra-hard platformers, but I have no intention of learning to speedrun, and if a game is built in such a way that it’s nigh-impossible to beat unless speedrunning tactics are beaten into you through trial-and-error, then the (base) game is either too hard for its own good or is looking to be played by a very precise audience. But again, that may just be a “me” problem, and this issue of mine says nothing about the game’s actual quality.

Scoot's blood is splattered every time he dies, so you can
get annice visual aid of all the places where you got
repeatedly killed in horrible fashion.

Mind you, at least Scoot Kaboom tries to be more accessible. Before you start playing and during the game, you have access to a “Modifiers” page in the Start menu. On there, you can change a number of elements about gameplay, in a way to make the game either easier or harder for you. More checkpoints? Enabling double jump for Scoot? Invincibility? Sure! There’s a collection quest involving 23 gems hidden around the map, usually at the end of very tough passages; normally, you have to carry the Gem back to the closest save point, but by toggling on Instant Pickup, you can skip that second step. Last but not least, you can modify the Tomb Speed (the speed at which hazards go in the tomb itself) and the entire game’s speed, both from 100% all the way down to 50%. So you can, in fact, make the game a lot easier; not necessarily “easy”, but a few notches down from the mad difficulty of the base game. Of course, for the sake of this review, I wanted to finish it on its normal settings.

So many unlockables... but I'm good playing
through that thing just once.

Most level design tropes appear: Teleporters,
gravity shifts, blackout parts... Yep, there's a
little bit of everything to make your life Heck.

Before the game starts, you can also choose a different player character (many can be unlocked by beating other modes or fulfilling a requirement, ex. “Beat the game with all Gems”) and a different food (which is the goal of the game, the item Scoot ends up hunting down the titular Tomb of Doom after he’s been tossed into it. At the end of the game, once you pick up the food item, Scoot becomes almighty and can run through a straight path out of the Tomb, now indestructible). After beating the base game once, you unlock several new modes that change the game in some way: Destruction (you destroy hazards), Speedrun, Endurance (you only have 1 life), Gold Chase (you also have to collect every coin that’s been added), Rocketeer (play the game in reverse), and Haunted (on top of the base hazards, a monster ghost is also chasing you down).

So yeah, this one’s pretty special. Music’s good, and I like the retro look of the game. High difficulty with a lot of options to lessen it, lots of gameplay modes, playable skins. There's little else I can say, really; much as I can rant, it's actually pretty good, and that it utilizes a seldom-seen idea is great. If you’re interested, be prepared for a pretty tough challenge.

Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom is available on Steam for 11.99$.