I’m nearing a major milestone of reviewing over 100 games for you the Horror Fuel reader but this review, in my opinion, is more important as it’s been both humbling and surreal. The game reviewed today comes to us from Sengi Games a Ukrainian-based indie game developer, even though their home country is in the middle of a war in which many of their countrymen have been murdered for simply being Ukrainian, they still worked on the game so it will be ready in time for its release date, the game: The Serpent Rogue. I want to thank Team 17 and Sengi Games (I hope you guys see this!) for the reviewing opportunity!
The Serpent Rogue is a third-person adventure where players are in a dark world and play as The Warden, a plague doctor-looking alchemist tasked with saving the world from a corrupting dark force that reawakened and is taking over the lands.
Now onto the game itself. The controls are pretty straightforward and respond quite well, the prompts on the screen letting you know (or in my case reminding me) which button does what which is a nice touch. The movement of the Warden is smooth as he (or she depending on the gender you pick at the start) traverses the world adding to the feel of the controls and animation matching up flawlessly which I attribute to my next point: the art. The art of The Serpent Rogue quite matches the game’s theme as it has the appearance of storybook illustrations come to life, I know this kind of animation or style of art in games is not new but sometimes the art does not match the game’s story/tone but here it compliments it well.
The game’s soundtrack helps bring the scenery to life and is pleasant to hear, though some of the songs are quite short and loop which usually annoys me I made an exception with this game as the songs are pleasant, and given this is an indie title I can’t really hold it against them. The same can be said about the ambient world sounds as they’re blended into the world of The Serpent Rogue well and bring it to life.
The gameplay is heavy on collecting and experimenting with alchemical ingredients to make potions that you can use yourself OR give to customers who leave you notes at a kiosk. You are limited with how much you can carry but there is a magical storage chest located throughout the world that you can put items in and retrieve them from any location which is good to know as there is a bit of a “Souls” element of the game. When you are killed, all your stuff (you were carrying at the time) will remain in the spot you died, you can go back and retrieve them but if you die again before you retrieve them, they’re gone forever.
Overall, I actually enjoyed playing The Serpent Rogue, it has a challenging difficulty (I don’t mean “Souls” challenging) that helps keep play sessions fresh and makes you work for story progression. The biggest thing I can’t get over is how complete the game is, The devs at Sengi Games really take their job seriously. It makes me look at other indie and AAA game developers judgingly for making incomplete and buggy games in comfort while Sengi was able to make and release their game while in the middle of a warzone, raising the bar for others.
On my scale of 1-10 The Serpent Rogue is an 8.5 for fantastic art, smooth controls, and intriguing gameplay, but some difficulty early on in the game’s story may potentially scare off players.
The Serpent Rogue will be defying the odds Today on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
