There are a few games in my collection that I’m always ready and waiting to play more, no matter how many hours I’ve invested into them. From Stardew Valley to Don’t Starve, some games feel like a vacation for my soul. For this reason, and this reason alone, I jumped when I first saw The Serpent Rogue. This game promised to include many of my favourite parts of Don’t Starve but wrapped in a completely new and exciting package.
The Serpent Rogue used a tried and true formula to build itself. Explore the world picking berries and herbs, fight enemies you come across, search their corpses and then use all the stuff you’ve gathered to craft other stuff. Make potions which will aid you in getting stuff and making food to eat. If this reminds you of Don’t Starve, you aren’t wrong.
Essentially, The Serpent Rogue is a procedurally generated adventure set in a world falling apart at the seams thanks to the big bad known as Morbus. Morbus is corrupting the very land by mutating the wildlife, bringing the dead back to the land of the living and conjuring storms that rip through the land, destroying all in their wake.
You play as a warden named Solomon, and it’s up to you and you alone to end Morbus and his reign of terror, thereby restoring the world to how it once was.
While the art style used for The Serpent Rogue is simple, lacking many small details in the character and the environment, I would never hold it against the game. I firmly believe the simplistic art makes up most of the game’s charm and is what first drew me to it. Thanks to the colour palette used, there is a constant feeling of melancholy and tension that works to deliver a game that feels every bit as serious as you could want from the genre. As a self-professed Don’t Starve addict, I can confidently tell you that The Serpent Rogue gives a similar hit while playing. The similarities are hard to ignore; from the collecting to the research and the crafting, a lot felt familiar here.
However, this familiarity made it hard for me to stay invested in the game. While The Serpent Rogue delivered a lot of what draws me to a game, it didn’t do so in a way that feels polished or well rounded. Instead, many of the systems and mechanics felt underdeveloped and clunky, making me yearn for other, similar games instead of genuinely becoming invested in this one.
An example of the above would be combat. No matter how long I played or how many weapons I crafted, combat always felt sluggish. If I had to explain it, it feels like you’ve just woken up from an operation; you’re still riding the full effects of the sedation, and you suddenly find yourself, axe in one half-dead arm, in the middle of a fight. It’s cumbersome to the point of constant frustration, which is only made worse by how brittle your weapons are and how fast you find yourself holding a couple of splinters where your trusty axe used to be.
