Scurge: Hive is an old game that almost no one played. It’s one of those obscurities of the Game Boy Advance/DS generation that slipped under the radar of most players. It ended up being a bargain game that a lot of people missed entirely and that’s a shame because it’s a uniquely challenging experience. This is definitely the rare title that is actually worthy of the term “hidden gem”, one of the most overused and poorly used terms in retro gaming.
Originally developed by Orbital Media, Scurge: Hive follows Jenosa Arma, a space bounty hunter who is hunting down a parasite that can infect both biological and mechanical systems. We’ve definitely never seen any story like this before *cough Metroid cough*. While you probably missed Scurge: Hive when it came out, publisher Ratalaika Games has thoughtfully remastered it for release on the Nintendo Switch and added in a host of quality-of-life upgrades as well.
While there is some clear inspiration taken from the Metroid series, Scurge: Hive is a uniquely challenging with its own personality. As Jenosa, you’ll be exploring a research lab on the planet Inos and as you might expect with an alien parasite, things go downhill pretty fast. The biggest shift here is one to an isometric perspective which may turn off some players. While we’ve seen plenty of modern games with isometrics such as Hades and Curse of the Old Gods (review here), Scurge: Hive features a number of jumping puzzles that, when combined with the game’s countdown timer, can be particularly stressful in a ¾ viewpoint. If you’re old enough to have played Landstalker on the Sega Genesis, you’ll know exactly what that means. Those of you that haven’t, be thankful unless you’re masochists.
Finding the parasite isn’t going to be easy though as its infection vectors hit everything in the facility and there are going to be a bunch of very unpleasant robots and monsters blocking your way. They’ve infiltrated the Confederation Research Lab’s computers, shut down essential systems, and turned the already convoluted and labyrinthine passageways of the labs into a death trap full of disease and hazards. Every time you think you’re making progress in Scurge: Hive, something is liable to get in your way and that’s just the beginning of your problems.
Unlike Samus’ suit, your protective gear isn’t entirely effective. While it lessens your exposure to the alien pathogen, it doesn’t entirely block infection. That means that as you work your way through the enemy-infested halls of the research lab, you’re also slowly building up infection levels in your own body. If you reach 100%, your health rapidly diminishes as well. Hit zero and it’s game over as you will have a massive buildup of infection that combines with her health damage and you’ll be turned by the virus into another monster! Fortunately, there are decontamination platforms strewn conveniently throughout the facility. These decon setups serve as both actual decontamination, reducing your infection back to 1% and as save points, allowing you to continue since you’re definitely going to die more than once.
You see, Scurge: Hive is constantly ticking down its biological time bomb. Infection builds very rapidly and missing a few jumps or taking a few hits from enemies is particularly deadly. Infected material is also strewn along the floors, forcing you to jump from clean area to clean area in order to keep infection low while you fight off waves or particularly aggressive enemies with a gun that can’t fire while you’re running and has limited strength. If that sounds tough, it’s because it definitely is. The stress of trying to keep infection down, coupled with the waves of enemies that respawn with every re-entry to a room and the distance between save points makes for a high-stress challenge that will have you sweating as your infection ticks up and your health drops with it. The inverse relationship between health and infection is incredibly tense and you constantly feel like failure has immediate and severe consequences.
Luckily, as the game goes on, you’ll acquire a fairly diverse arsenal as well. While enemies are initially difficult to defeat, gathering up the experimental weaponry of the lab allows you to augment your abilities with a handy pop-up menu where you can pick which special weapon you need, pausing the gameplay while you do so. Robots are susceptible to electrical attacks, energy beings are slaughtered by an energy dispersion weapon, and so on. Scurge: Hive rapidly becomes a puzzle-solving Metroidvania of sorts, though your progression is noticeably more linear. Using newfound abilities to freeze enemies, activate facility systems, and slaughter monsters will make the game a lot easier and more fun as well, though you’ll be switching weapon on the fly faster and faster as the game moves on.
Boss fights are surprisingly good as well, with rapid patterned attacks and multiple layers or forms. Of course, with your infection levels rising and your health dropping from damage, boss fights also end up more challenging than they might otherwise be, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting and the weird designs of the infected equipment and monsters are both fun and colorful. There’s not really anything innovative here in terms of boss design, but everything is extremely well-executed and the fun factor is high in boss battles, perhaps even more fun than the exploration gameplay.
While you’re busy fending off wave after wave of enemies and hot swapping weapons mid-combat, you’re also racking up experience points. Unlike Metroid, you’re not finding upgrades in hidden areas but instead leveling up as you play, slowing gaining additional HP with every level. As the enemies get nastier and more prolific, this is what keeps you alive. While you can skip through rooms without killing all the monsters that respawn with every entry, doing some damage will benefit you in the long run because you’re slowly grinding XP, making your survival just a bit more likely.
If Scurge: Hive sounds difficult, it definitely is. That’s probably a big part of why it’s so poorly known. A lot of players just gave up on this gruelling adventure back in the GBA days and the poor people who bought the game on the DS quickly found that it had inferior graphics and a poorer control scheme, making it an obscure oddity. Fortunately for us, Ratalaika recognized both the quality of Scurge: Hive and that it is particularly difficult and came up with an excellent solution. When the game boots up, you are presented with a main screen where you can select from the US or Japanese versions of the game. More importantly, you can also enter the settings menu and activate a variety of cheats that make the game significantly easier.
The cheat menu is fairly extensive for Scurge: Hive and if you want to have a slightly more relaxed experience or turn things all the way down to a story mode, there are settings for all of it. You can turn off infection entirely (holding you at 1%), set your level to maximum for that extra boost of health, give yourself infinite Energy so you can use the autofire without recharging, and even set yourself to invincibility (though you glow and it’s kind of irritating). There are also settings for a heal function, infinite security cards so you can bypass much of the exploration, and you can easily unlock all the extras in the game too. With a menu like this, Scurge: Hive becomes much more accessible. We turned off the infection counter partway through this review due to time constraints but otherwise played things as they were intended and the game is still challenging and occasionally frustrating, but you don’t die nearly as often.
As well as cheats there are a ton of quality-of-life updates to Scurge: Hive as well. In addition to the cheat menu and the in-game button configurations, you can also auto-save and auto-load with hotkey combinations and use the shoulder buttons for turbo and rewind, making the challenging jumps and frustrating enemies a breeze by backing up if you make a mistake or take too many hits. Combined with the cheat menu, this makes you an unstoppable force and really ups the fun factor of the game, allowing you to take your time and enjoy the excellent visual design or not panic when you miss a key jump as your infection counter rises.
This is an old game, and it’s been converted from the GBA to modern high definition screens so while the pixel art is excellent, it’s a big chunky as well. The monster designs, environments, and character models are all great here, but they’re also upscaled in size rather significantly. Ratalaika thought of this too, and in addition to the cheat menu, there are a host of visual settings to account for every preference including multiple scale modes, filters, zoom options, shaders, and even frame skip selections. In short, you can heavily customize your Scurge: Hive experience in terms of both gameplay and visuals.
Those visuals are a great nostalgia blast with excellent pixel design, chunky aliens, and cool high-tech designs. This is a beautiful game with some excellent color palettes and solid variety that keeps you engaged. Sure there are some color swaps on a few enemies, but by and large the creativity is high here and you’re going to enjoy everything (except maybe the fixed isometric camera). The GUI is well-designed too, even if it’s fairly minimalist and you’ll mostly be using the map. Sound is a different story however. While the music is decent, it’s not a stunning soundtrack that you’ll be hunting down and the enemy noises can be both irritating and repetitive, especially some of the robotic alerts that grate on the ears. While they make sense, the sound effects are a bit harsh here and there and playing with the sound lowered or tweaking the sound effects levels is definitely worth your time.
There aren’t all that many negatives about Scurge: Hive. Sure, it’s a tough game, but Ratalaika has compensated admirably for that with all of the additional options available. When you first boot up the game, the intro isn’t skippable either which can be somewhat frustrating until you realize that the main game menu allows for save state loading, bypassing the slow title screen that scrolls every time it is loaded. The extras are neat as well, with some scans of original documents and art from the game, but they aren’t particularly detailed and it’s a shame there’s no expansion of story or additional content aside from the manual, as this feels like a world that could be expanded further.
Scurge: Hive is a unique experience that, while somewhat dated, is incredibly fun and can be quite challenging. The updates to the overall system that you can access from the main menu are outstanding and make the game very accessible for players of any level, and while the story is somewhat minimal, it’s still interesting and the game is fun enough that it’s definitely worth your time. At only $15 it isn’t a particularly impressive game and it’s going to scratch that retro itch incredibly well. It’s also 20% off on sale until the end of October, so if you act now, you can get it even cheaper! If you’ve got the spare cash and the time, give Scurge: Hive a chance because this is one obscure retro title that deserves your attention!
This review is based on a digital copy of Scurge: Hive provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. Scurge: Hive is also available for PS4, PS5, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.