Backpack Scavenger Reviews

Really fun loop. Stylish art, smart mechanics, and lots of potential. Looking forward to future updates!

It's a good enjoyable game. But, there's several bugs present. 1. Character select screen can sometimes fail to load properly. Which means you have to reload your save until it works. 2. Sometimes loading a level will just fail to load. So... once again, reloading save until it works. Which can be frustrating, especially if you have an inventory and storage area that are completely full. 3. Not a bug, but, the magical bomb tower thing, shoots fast enough that if you get hit by it and stunned it's basically game over unless your character is fast. I think it's a little too fast shooting personally. Overall, I'd say it's worth playing, but, just know it does have some frustrating bugs at present. EDIT: Going to refund for the time being, I've reached a stage where the maps no longer load at all. Which makes playing impossible. So, I will wishlist it once again and see for the future. It's definitely promising though, I just can't afford to have a game that's basically unplayable at present.

This game is needlessly difficult and tedious for what it is. Calling this game a 'roguelite' is deceptive wording. You keep a stash and build a city in between runs if you succeed, but if you ever die you not only lose your character but you also lose ALL your progress on the city builder. The game starts you off in a small map with no timer and enemies that cant attack you if you dont stand still, but after 5 minutes of that map you are banned from that map and never allowed to go back to it and forced to use a portal machine to go to maps that are 10x more difficult. The lowest difficulty map available at the start has dust clouds that chase you and deal contact damage and never de-aggro until you extract, stone towers that if they hit you once stun lock you until you die, and 75% of the items on the ground are secretly landmines which you have no way of determining because every item is a pile of dust until you extract and identify it. Your character also has no attacks or skills or anything so you just walk around and get shit on by enemies and mines and can't do anything to avoid any of it. If you manage to survive all this BS and extract, well theres no healing between runs without completing buildings so you are expected to repeat this 5-10 more times without dying to complete a healing building so you can heal a measly 5 health between runs per healing building. When you eventually die your city decides to blow itself up out of shame and make you start from the beginning for no damn reason. Just let the city stay persistent between character deaths and maybe you have a fun game here, but when you lose everything over and over again from stepping on landmines that look exactly like any regular items for an hour and a half and have fuck all to show for it its not fun at all.

So you run around and collect items with your backpack to build your base, except, sometimes you don't get the blueprints to build defensive structures, so you are reset to square 1, you pick a traveler with a large backpack, only to have it be glitched and not allow items to be placed in the backpack, waisting your run for mats.

Interesting twist on the genre, but it definitely still needs a lot of work. As others have mentioned, the new game player select bug is pretty unacceptable. I restarted the game 3 times after after the 4th i refunded. That said, I'm willing to give it another shot in a few months, once some refinements have been made. The resource balance needs some work as well. Debris and some of the other basic resources are a big bottle neck for getting structures built, and the there should probably be some low-level portal location to mass-collect wood/stone/etc.

Ill give it time to cook and eat my 10 bucks but seriously this game is more broken than pretty much every abandoned early access game.

Game is extremely buggy, failed to load screens. Quest descriptors missing. Unplaceable blueprints, You name it. Gave it a shot but till they fix the bugs its a no dawg

In Backpack Scavenger, players assume the role of a lone scavenger who joins the fortified city of Bastion, aiding its garrison in the fight against an impending undead horde. Your mission is to scour the battlefield for valuable resources - raw materials, tools, and weapons - to support the defense effort. The battlefield is procedurally generated, filled with traps, environmental hazards, and roaming enemies. Items are often obscured by dust, challenging you to identify them by shape alone—a clever mechanic that blends visual intuition with risk and reward. Inventory management is both strategic and tactile, featuring a grid-based system where space is limited and items can be rotated to fit, Tetris-style. Items are not only stat-randomized but visually distinct, making each scavenging run feel fresh and unpredictable. Back at Bastion, you can expand the stronghold by acquiring blueprints and gathering materials to construct new buildings. These structures unlock crafting options, unit training, or additional storage, deepening your strategic choices. Periodically, Bastion is assaulted by waves of undead. During these sieges, gameplay shifts to a tactical mini-game where you position your units and fortifications—everything you've managed to prepare—in defense of the city. Death isn’t the end. Instead, it propels you into a massive progression tree, reminiscent of a skill tree, where instead of experience points, you complete small quests to unlock new items, buildings, and upgrades for future runs. Narrative-wise, the game keeps things light. A handful of charmingly illustrated NPCs guide you through the world’s mechanics with quick, witty dialogue. The 2D art style leans into a dark comic book aesthetic, reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon, complementing the game's grim yet slightly whimsical tone.

Game is a buggy mess and feels like a product of vibe coding. Not even worth 10 dollars because it's literally unplayable. You die in a portal and your game is hardlocked. Congratulations! Sometimes you will "identify" an item and it never shows as an item. You now have an unclickable object in your inventory. You run around and put dusty junk in a backpack. Then eventually monsters come out. You have no means of dodging or fighting them. You just get smacked around and killed. Graphics of a flash game from 2007 with the bugs of a flash game from 2025.

The game is very buggy. The main issue is at the character select screen, where it locks up. You have to reload your save game 3 to 6 times to get it to work. There are also in-game issues, if you can manage to get back into the game. Most of them result in you dying, which sends you back to the non-functional character select screen... All of this makes me very sad, as the initial gameplay loop was a lot of fun. But you get slaughtered in an impossible battle with the undead on the first night, and it's all downhill from there...