Video Game Review: The Serpent Rogue

Developer: Sengi Games

Publisher: Team17

Genre: Crafting-focused Sandbox

Reviewed On: PlayStation 5

Also Available For: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox

The Serpent Rogue is a very fun game that I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to. The Basics are that the player assumes the role of a newborn Warden, mystical humanoid creatures whose purpose is upholding the balance of nature and aiding mortals with their illnesses and other troubles. Wardens – by which I mean you, the player – do this by gathering resources from the world around them, studying them, and figuring out how to use them to concoct all manner of potions, poultices, and brews while also looking for a way to cleanse the fantasy-standard corruption creeping across the land. In short, The Serpent Rogue is a survival crafting game with a bit of the scientific method woven into its DNA.

The Serpent Rogue starts off slow as a result of it dropping the player into the world with very minimal direction or explanation of how anything works. If you’re the sort of gamer that doesn’t have the patience to figure nearly everything out on your own, you can stop reading this review right now, because I can say definitively that this is not your kind of game. However, for those who do get a kick out of stumbling around blindly until you trip over discoveries, there’s a lot to love here. The game has three main methods of crafting: potion brewing, forging, and cooking. Each one is about what you’d expect, with the minor exception that in order to use potion ingredients you have to first research them, which requires expending a certain number of samples of that resource. Additionally, once a component has been fully researched, the only thing the player learns is its property, and it is then up to them to figure out what ingredients to combine. Very rarely will recipes be given to the player outright, resulting in a delightful system of trial-and-error (lots and lots of error) in order to learn anything. After you figure a few things out, however, the rest starts to fall into place faster and faster, and before you know it you’ll be brewing potions and fulfilling requests like nobody’s business.

The process of gathering ingredients is simple but oddly addicting. The player has to go out into various wild areas to forage, fight corrupted creatures, and track down chests while keeping an eye on a storm tracker that lets them know how long they have before the area is wiped clean of everything inside – including them, should they fail to vacate the region. In addition to instilling a certain sense of urgency even once the player starts to get a handle on things, the storms reset and scramble foraging opportunities so you can’t simply hit up the exact same spots every time. It preserves a certain sense of exploration while also allowing for a sense of familiarity that wouldn’t be possible with more complete randomization. The storms also provide regular opportunity to go back to town and check on your companions and tamed animals, unlike other games where you might just keep finding one more thing to investigate before calling the expedition to an end.

Oh, and the fishing minigame is an interesting take on the mechanice – rather than using a rod or net or whatever, you simply throw a worm into the fishing spot and grab the fish as they leap out of the water; it’s oddly cute.

The Serpent Rogue’s visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. Though the graphical style is smooth and appealing, the world itself is very drab and gray, bordering on lifeless. On the one hand it makes sense – the Warden is tasked with restoring life to the world and beating back the corruption throwing nature out of balance, so if everything was still lush and colorful and pretty it wouldn’t make sense. On the other hand, it’s not very fun to look at, and brings the overall experience down. The music is nice at least, and helps set a good mood for foraging and exploring – and even, occasionally, fighting.

I will admit that it’s entirely possible the world does start looking more alive and pretty as you get further in, because I didn’t actually make it that far. The reason for that, however, is somewhat damning, and brings me back to the reason I said I might never go back to the game. The PS5 version at least, and possibly other versions though I can’t say for certain, is fairly unstable, with crashes being fairly common. For the most part it’s not the sort of game where that would be a huge problem, as it auto-saves progress frequently and successes are easy to replicate (the scientific process is, after all, partially defined by being able to repeat an experiment’s results). However, at one point my game crashed right as it was auto-saving, which meant that upon restarting the application and trying to load back in it immediately crashed again every time. In other words, the save file was kaput, and it completely destroyed my motivation to play more.

Hopefully the developers of The Serpent Rogue will put out a patch to fix this issue at some point in the future, but for now it’s definitely something to be wary of if you’re considering buying. It really is a shame, too, because I liked what I played of it quite a bit, and I genuinely hope someday I don’t feel my brain go limp at the prospect of having to start all over.