The Indie Informer

Sometimes I worry that the Flash game is going to be lost forever. After Adobe Flash was shut down in 2020, an entire era of browser-based gaming disappeared overnight, but luckily, the Spirit of the Flash Game™ is alive and well in Scrabdackle, a charming adventure game that feels born out of the ashes of the glory days of Newgrounds.com. Hand-drawn using thick, black lines as if sketched on a notepad and then miraculously uploaded to Steam, Scrabdackle Act 1 is a delightful romp about summoning the courage to find your way back home and enjoying the journey along the way.

Scrabdackle follows the adventures of Blue, a wizard-in-training who gets thrown out the window of his magic school and has to learn the ropes of the unfamiliar outside world to make it back. In my first half hour or so with the game, I figured I knew what to expect: a top-down adventure game with some light puzzle elements. However, as I started exploring the world, a feeling of excitement washed over me. Scrabdackle quickly reveals it’s much bigger than it first lets on. You start exploring a swamp with secrets packed in every quadrant, and then make it to a city, and then a cursed canyon, and then a castle run by ducks. Scrabdackel grows and grows, revealing secret after secret, rewarding your curiosity with secret vendors, silly NPC interactions, and stickers to be placed on your various spell notebooks.

There’s a certain amount of whimsy to Scrabdackle that makes it a delight to pick up after each session. The game is packed full of comedic moments that feel straight out of the Flash game era. Scrabdackle frequently pokes fun at its own mechanics without undermining them in the slightest since, while silly, the game is a confident adventure game that doesn’t simply require passive engagement. For example, the first boss fight is set up by joking about the idea of clearing out monsters and how simply attacking every living thing you encounter is a potentially cruel way to explore the world. The boss fight that follows took me by surprise with its difficulty since, up to that point, I was able to easily clear out any monsters I encountered with a few quick spells. The boss did not go down so easily and took me three tries of kiting around slam attacks and avoiding my own spells the monster reflected back at me.

It’s always a breath of fresh air when a game knows how to balance comedy and mechanics. Scrabdackle walks that line with grace. There’s plenty of personality to be found in every conversation with NPCs and inside Blue’s various journals, where they keep detailed notes about the adventure.

I really appreciate the perspective Blue is written from. While Scrabdackle’s narrative might seem simple and silly on the surface (I mean, it is both of those things), it is a largely compassionate story. Blue has never left the castle before, but despite being literally thrown into a world they have no experience in, they are not judgmental. Instead, Blue usually offers help to the people who live outside the castle’s walls. Sometimes it’s not so simple, like with the duck empire, but there’s an overall feeling of sweetness that I’ve attached to my time with the game.

There’s a lot that’s been packed into Scrabdakle Act 1, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I haven’t hit the end of the act yet, but there are still plenty of areas I want to re-explore as I gain new abilities. With how everything gets bigger and bigger by simply following the critical path and dipping my toes into side objectives, I can’t wait to keep returning to Scrabdackle to see what else is waiting to be found that’s still obscured from my view.

So often, it feels like genre games are complemented with asterisks, and comedy games, in my view, get this most often. “It’s good for a comedy game” is such a common refrain, but Scrabdackle isn’t just good for a comedy game; it is a great game that features great comedy. It’s something worth appreciating for its straightforwardness, but also digging a little deeper to find its real meaning. But also, it’s a silly game about cartoon wizards.