In Serpent’s Gaze, we play as a scion and your purpose is to venture into an ancient desert and wipe out the opposing gods ruling the land. We recently spent time with this new Early Access release from developer Feeble Minds. As we learned in a recent interview with the studio, the veteran team has moved away from colorful simulations to deliver a dark, demanding experience. Join us after the trailer jump to see if this punishing 1-4 player co-op action game deserves your attention with its heavy, but very tactical combat and run-based structure.
Handcrafted Combat
Serpent’s Gaze is a challenging soulslike game, but it thankfully starts with a tutorial that explains things in a very simple way. You grab a weapon, fight tough enemies, and face relentless bosses. You do this as many times as needed to progress. The developers describe the combat as a mix of a soulslike and a roguelike—a formula we already love, even in Early Access.
Exploring the handcrafted levels, we collect upgrades like blessings from deities, gifts from our patron, and relics that change our strategy. Fast attacks and status-effect damage currently feel like the easiest way for us to survive. However, we took our time to experiment with slower, heavy-hitting weapons. We loved the weighty thrill of mastering the timing of slower gear and how satisfying it feels to land a solid hit. The long recovery windows left us exposed to faster enemies, but we eventually learned to accept that risk, even though the game clearly rewards speed over raw power.
Because it is also a roguelike, the game uses a run-based system. We think this hybrid approach works wonderfully. The combined mechanics keep things fresh, and the Curse system throws interesting random variables into each run, ranging from roaming minibosses to environmental hazards. Curses, we quickly learned, are rarely forgiving. Then again, nothing in Serpent’s Gaze is.
Some runs felt impossible for us to finish, especially when we were caught in a ‘Slow-Step’ hazard while surrounded by enemies with Vampiric Auras. We aren’t the best at soulslikes, and when the odds were stacked against us, we often struggled. A more skilled player might have handled those situations flawlessly, but we simply dealt with it by starting another run, crossing our fingers, and hoping for better luck.
There is also an Awareness system that automatically scales the difficulty, making the world harder as we string together successful runs. Thankfully, the team recently added a simple save system, so we no longer have to finish an entire run in a single sitting.
The Co-op Experience
You can tackle Serpent’s Gaze solo, and it is certainly a rewarding experience to survive using just your wits and reflexes in such an oppressive world. However, we had the most fun playing with our nephews. The game truly shines in a group of up to four players. Feeble Minds has done a wonderful job adjusting enemy aggression and attack arcs to handle multiple targets.
Some players might feel that co-op makes things too chaotic, but we disagree. When teammates cooperate and use the mechanics to everyone’s benefit, juggling boss aggro and focusing attacks is a beautiful thing to watch. This is especially true when you learn to use wide-arc enemy attacks to your advantage. Serpent’s Gaze requires a surprising amount of teamwork and communication, which for us, was the most enjoyable way to play.
The world is split into distinct environments occupied by different factions.
Making the Desert Bloom
For a game in Early Access, Serpent’s Gaze feels incredibly polished. It delivers a strict, but demanding combat experience that will only get better—especially with the devs planning to add a third domain, a new faction, and a new god. The game is in a great state right now, and the mix of tactical co-op and handcrafted progression gives us and our nephews plenty of reasons to keep returning to the desert. We hope you give it a try too, especially considering the low price of admission.
- Developer: Feeble Minds
- Publisher: Feeble Minds
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: May 25, 2026
- Genre: Action, Souls-like, Roguelike
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