Serpent in the Staglands

Very sad to write this review, but this game is simply not worth time and money, and even though it's full of good ideas, it's unfinished, unpolished, and unrewarding experience. I won't mention the lack of balance and crazy difficulty early on among the negatives. after all, it's clearly part of the old-school appeal. But if you are looking for a big rich world, an interesting setting, intriguing characters, and a plot that challenges you and makes you think -- this game has NONE of that. The writing is amateurish and minimalist, with almost no choice of options. Locations are empty, NPCs are very bland. Many quests are broken with NPCs not reacting to progress and simply restarting their dialog again when they see you. The plot of the game gets explained to you by the corny fantasy villain in the end, and you will likely find yourself locked out of the "good" ending because you followed one of the quests wrong, and the game isn't good at keeping track of things. Yet, the amount of effort this game will take to complete rivals the juggernauts like Disco Elysium, Planescape Torment, and Fallout 2. There is no automatic journal(write your own notes), you don't know where the towns and locations on the map are(even though you are a literal God), and very often your progress will be barred by puzzles with no hints. Unfortunately, after playing this I feel as if I played a really bad tabletop RPG, the richness of the plot is hidden somewhere in the DMs head and the story depends entirely on you being a hopeless fool with no agency, who gets duped at every turn and falls headfirst into traps. Also, don't forget to follow quests for completely no reason, because there is simply nothing else to do. Sad fact is, the developers confuse "hard-to-get-into game" with being "a smart game", or a "deep game." Don't be fooled. Many thanks to this blog: http://crpgrevisited.blogspot.com/search/label/Serpent%20in%20the%20Staglands The only reason I even managed to get through the game, and also some of the things in the game can only be learned from this pdf (https://serpentinthestaglands.com/builds/Erleins_Handbook.pdf) which is in addition to this manual (https://serpentinthestaglands.com/manual/) that you are expected to read before hand. I really tried to love you, Serpent in the Staglands.

I've spent so much time in this game, it would be hard to put it in words why I absolutely love it. But I'll try anyway. First off, it's a relatively small game (don't be intimidated by my playtime) - I think you can get through it in 10 hours without pushing yourself, and you can definitely speedrun it in less than a hour. Story is unique and engaging, there are three possible endings depending on your actions in main- and side- quests and there are some choices to be made. Game world is atmospheric, beautiful and, dare I say, cozy. You can explore it as throughout as you want and you'll always find something interesting. Sound and music are very nice. Combat is fun and has some very interesting tweaks to it and unique cast system. There are many skills, spells and abilities to choose from and you can build your party (almost) any way you want and be successful in combat and exploration. Game has some exploits, but in my opinion they make it even more fun and explorable. Devs still to this date patch it though. Clearly a lot of love were put in this game and although there are some bugs and unpolishness to it, all in all it's a great experience.

Nah. I get wanting to make your game "old school" and stuff, that's why I bought it, but it shouldn't mean it's clunky, buggy and just plain tedious. Targeting sucks, my characters can't remember the order I put them in, the pathfinding is weak, terrible save/load times, just plays like a brick in general. And I get the "our game is difficult" gimmick, after having my whole party wiped out by a fox (oh, wow, yeah, super difficult, super oldschool) I managed to familiarize myself with the combat/spell system to the point of semi-confidently exploring and killing goblins and bandits and whatnot, but it's just tedious. That's not how you do "difficult". The overall vibe is artsy-fartsy "we think we know what an RPG is but in reality we don't" kinda deal, at least so far - looks like the RPG element is limited to the mechanics and build porn. The dialogues seem flat and meaningless, no amount of "what ho" can fix it. So far I regret spending money on it, I'll give it some more time but I don't think it'll get any better.

Have you ever bought a game because it was on sale and didn't bother to look at the reviews? Yeah? Same here. Which is why I have this game. Generally I love these squad-based isometric fantasy games. I grew up playing games like this. And this game has a unique setting. But if you read some of the other reviews you will probably not start a play-thru of this game. It has some real problems: too many fetch quests, overwhelmingly hard combat, bugs, unrewarding exploration, no real choice. A fool doesn't learn from the mistakes of others. Don't be a fool. Buying this was a mistake.

I [i]really[/i] wanted to love this game. The atmosphere is great, the art is fantastic and only enhances the gloomy world your thrust into and how oppressive it all [i]feels[/i]...and then you realize that every single battle that you encounter, you [i]will[/i] reload and return with the appropriate strategy as you have to know the battle before going in. There is very little flexibility in the beginning so you can easily get railroaded into playing the way the developer wanted you to play, not the way you want to.

Serpent in the Staglands is a very good, traditional CRPG. It took me a while to get a handle on the game's mechanics, but it was worth it because the game was well made. I heavily relied on the Steam guides written by other gamers. The guides helped with the learning curve quite a bit.

Painfully hard, old-school, open world CRPG that demands memorization, extensive note taking and exploration to make any headway. The mechanics and lore are completely unique to the game world (based loosely on the Transylvanian bronze age) and if you don't look at every-damn-thing in the first few maps, you are going to absolutely suck at life until you figure out what you missed. This game doesn't hold your hand at all, but does thoroughly enjoy kicking you in the teeth. The premise is super simple too: you're a god with a wicked hangover that just wants to find their keys and go home. This is exactly how games should be made. It's awesome. Play it. 5/5 crop goblins agree. #coxmaddox

I love this game....but it's not that good either. I'll certainly never finish. Basically, SITSL has all the trappings of an amazing CRPG...it's atmosphere, premise and opening are incredible; it's music is especially lush, and the game's balance is nice too - not to simple, not too complex - so it's foundation really promises a lot. But the developers just didn't give the player enough game to make the most of that. The combat promises a lot, but ultimately ends up being very repetitive, and the world is full of trash mobs and pointless NPCs. It feels huge, yet empty and vapid at the same time. In fact it almost feels like an Alpha build. I recommend it just to experience that atmosphere at intro though. Just wow at how good it is, I've not been so drawn into a game by it's intro in years. It's worth playing, but I'll be amazed if you finish it. The developers desperately need to take the foundation and make a fuller fleshed out sequel.

1) Combat is obtusely hard. Much harder than Darklands or any other 90's rpg, and I've played them all. Even Age of Decadence had easier fights for combat builds. It's possible to cheese almost all of them by edging forward and carefully luring only one enemy at a time, but this is pretty much exploiting poor enemy AI and damages immersion. Unlike Darklands there is also no 'knocked out party member that can be revived later' mechanic - party members that go down are dead forever, with no resurrection mechanic. 2) Areas are very large, mostly empty and the party walks very slowly. Map mode zooms out only slightly and still requires a lot of scrolling to look around the map. Overall experience thus has way too much empty walking. I would say this was the real enjpoyment-killer - those 40 hour playthrough times are probably three quarters walking. In Darklands there are rare maps requiring walking slowly across a large map in a similar manner; these are commonly regarded the worst parts of the game. In Staglands this is the entire game. 3) Characterizations are pretty much empty. Only three or four NPCs in the starting temple have something interesting to say, with everyone else having two or three lines of responses and then nothing more - the named NPCs have interactivity as poor as unnamed ones in other RPGS. 4) Poor sound/music design. Music frequently suddenly switches to another track - eg ambient moody to busy crowds with no transition at all - for no perceptible reason, spells have no sound effects whatsoever. 5) Interface is remarkably clunky, despite looking pretty. The number of clicks to assign a skill or stat point is silly; dragging an item to another item's slot does not swap them, have to manually move to empty slots one by one; a whole class of magic requires typing in a three word command every single time you want to cast a debuff on an enemy. I understand the game is made by a two person team, but a lot of these are not due to needing too much effort to implement, but poor design choices. Hopefully their future efforts will have less rough edges. Till then i'm going to play through Darklands for the fifth or sixth time.

This game is very special and lot´s of fun once you learn how to play it (not that difficult). I don´t get the mixed rating score. It´s a 9/10 for me.