The Serpent Rogue Review

The Serpent Rogue is an action adventure game that’s set in a dark fantasy world where corruption is slowly taking over the land sent into motion by the titular serpent rogue. You play as the warden, a plague mask wearing mysterious person whose job it is to cleanse the corruption from the world, the atmosphere of the game is delightfully dark and the more stylized graphics definitely suit the experience better than say photorealistic graphics.

You explore the decaying corners of a creepy fantasy environment, though it isn’t just a game with cool visuals where you hack and slash your way through corrupted animals and overgrown vine formations, a significant chunk of the game is bolstered by crafting mechanics, the warden is after all mostly alone in this dark reality so he has to make sure he’s prepared, you can craft your own weapons, research plants you come across, brew potions using alchemy and like any other game with crafting there’s always the chance to fail in your experiment and with resources being limited you’ve got to be careful about those things but limited resources just gives players a reason to explore every inch of the map to make sure they’ve found all the resources they need.

The Serpent Rogue is definitely a game that encourages exploration, there’s a solid questline but I just love the chance to explore all the little branching paths and hidden nooks and crannies, there’s also the ability to tame animal companions, acquire human followers like you’re some sort of cult leader, though there’s a lot of systems thrown at you pretty early on and usually in text dumps rather than practical tutorials which may be overwhelming for some players. There’s a combat system in this game understandably because corrupted things aren’t happy that you’re trying to un-corrupt them and undo the evil work of the serpent rogue, this is where the game is a little weak on the tutorial side, there is definitely room for the developers to explain the combat better. Death has a slight penalty but it’s very slight you lose all your items but you can just run back to the spot where you died and pick them up again but if you die before reaching that spot your items are gone for good soulsborne players will probably find this mechanic familiar so as much as it sucks to die, as long as you’re quick and tricky you can get your stuff back and just figure out a different way to solve your problems, frustrating but fairly manageable assuming you can recover your items and don’t essentially lose everything.

This game is definitely one that’s best played slowly making sure you’re familiar with each new mechanic before pressing onward but I did play enough to know that I want to play more, the game is challenging and no where near perfect, but I recommend this to any fans of action adventure game set in a dark premise.

Purchase The Serpent Rogue on Steam!