Roguelikes are pretty commonplace these days, so it’s more about finding one that you really click with.

I’ve played a few lately I really love and enjoy. Sadly, The Serpent Rogue wasn’t one of them.

It’s a game that takes a long time to find its rhythm with a convoluted, confusing opening few hours that just lends itself to frustration more than anything else. And even when it all does start to become clear, there’s this aura of repetition permeating throughout.

If you’re not dying from the random corruption storms, you’re getting constant bleeding damage because you walked over the wrong thing. Then you find yourself massively overpowered by an enemy when you get into battle and find yourself struggling to make a dent. It just doesn’t feel balanced or particularly enjoyable.

There’s some nice ideas between all of that, anchored with a gathering mechanic with herbs and flowers for making nice concoctions and potions. And the resource gathering helps you build useful items like shovels and axes. You can rear and train animals, building up relationships with them, and do research to learn more about your world.

Despite that, the game just feels a little too scattered. It struggles to stick to one lane, trying to cast a wide net and not really bringing in anything too interesting for longer than a few minutes at a time. On one hand it’s a survival adventure, then it’s progression focused, back to a rogue-like. For me, it just seemed to miss the hook that many others in the genre have perfected.

True, The Serpent Rogue isn’t designed to hold your hand. You get an overview of your situation and the things you can do. There’s objectives at the top to guide you but beyond that you’re on your own. And that’s fine if you have some experience with the genre, but even if you do, you often find yourself just wandering around.

And when you’re not wandering, you’re usually waiting for something, whether that’s for a storm to pass or for some random item that you need to spawn. To make matters worse, despite the environments being procedurally generated and random, there’s only a handful to discover, really limiting the exploration potential

I will give some credit to the wonderful, unsettling soundtrack, though and the game has a really unique artstyle that immediately drew me to the action. Some wonderful work has gone into that and it really shows.

Unfortunately for me, the game just didn’t hold my interest for too long and despite numerous times dipping in and out, I found myself easily distracted and disengaged from the experience. A real shame.