Serious Sam: The Random Encounter

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is a turn-based RPG built around the Serious Sam license, developed by Vlambeer before they found their stride with Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing. The core conceit is exactly as strange as it sounds: you assemble a squad of Sams, pick your loadout of weapons from the series' arsenal, and resolve combat through a side-scrolling, real-time-input battle system that owes more to old-school JRPGs than anything Croteam ever made. Enemies charge at you from the right side of the screen, you fire weapons in real time while managing cooldowns, and positioning matters in ways that feel almost accidental for a game this short. The weapon selection is the clearest nod to the source material. Rocket launchers, miniguns, and the classic double-barrel shotgun are all present, and choosing the right loadout for a wave of enemies is the closest thing to actual strategy the game offers. There is a light RPG layer underneath, with experience points, leveling, and the occasional random encounter on an overworld map. But calling it deep would be a stretch. The RPG systems exist more as scaffolding for the joke than as a genuinely engaging progression loop. By hour two, you have seen most of what the game has to offer mechanically, and there is no meaningful build variety to chase past that point. The writing leans hard on self-aware absurdist humor, which lands about half the time. If you find the premise of Serious Sam stumbling through turn-based JRPG tropes funny, you will squeeze some genuine chuckles out of the early hours. If you need that joke to evolve, it does not. The game is short enough that it does not exactly overstay its welcome, but it also never quite justifies why it exists beyond being a clever Game Jam-style experiment that got a full commercial release. The mixed Steam reviews and a Metacritic score sitting at 64 are both honest summaries of what you are getting. For Vlambeer fans, this is a historical curiosity worth a look purely for studio archaeology reasons. It shows early traces of the tight, systems-driven design thinking that would later bloom into much better games. For anyone coming here as an RPG player hoping for character arcs, narrative payoff, or choices that matter, there is essentially nothing here for you. There are no branching decisions, no world to absorb, no writing that rewards a second pass. For Serious Sam fans, it is a novelty rather than an extension of what that series does well. If your interest is genuine RPG depth, skip this and go literally anywhere else. If you want a 90-minute oddity from a developer mid-evolution, it scratches that specific itch without demanding much from you in return. Monika, Scout Team