Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island Review

I couldn’t believe Shiren the Wanderer was actually one of the very first roguelike games, long before The Binding of Issac would bring the genre into the mainstream. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration—Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is one of the least fun roguelikes I’ve ever played.

The story sees the titular Shiren (or whatever the player wishes to name him) and his talking ferret Koppa heading to the mysterious Serpentcoil Island in search of treasure. However, there’s a bit more going on since they both had a vision of a girl trapped within the belly of a monster resting deep within the island’s dungeon. However, the two are promptly defeated and, like every other person who attempted the dungeon, are returned to a local village with no equipment or memory of the dungeon. Undeterred, the two attempt the dungeon again, determined to reach the summit, rescue the princess and maybe get some treasure.

It’s about as fine a story as a game like this needs. There’s some other business going on with some god named Kokatsu that caused a drought and some radical followers who think defeating the monster of Serpentcoil Island will invoke Kokatsu’s wrath, but for the sake of spoilers, I won’t say anymore. Like most games in the genre, the piecemeal story provides an added incentive to continue challenging the dungeon—further facilitating the gameplay, and speaking of which…

As I mentioned at the start, Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island takes the form of a “turn-based” roguelike with minor RPG elements. Players will attempt to traverse 30 floors of Serpentcoil Island, finding weapons and items, battling monsters, and slowly gaining EXP and levelling up. If players are defeated, they will return to the start of the dungeon, literally starting over from square one.

In theory, it should work. It follows the same basic formula as the games that came before it—or, in this case, after it—but whether it is an unwillingness to evolve or perhaps a reverence for the series’ roots, Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is never really challenging, nor does it ever feel rewarding or fun to play.

The first problem I have with this game comes mainly from the way it controls. Whenever the player takes an action, all subsequent monsters will also make a move—similar to something like Crypt of the NecroDancer. In this way, it makes it incredibly difficult to outmaneuver enemies, especially when new ones spawn and get anywhere close to you.

Furthermore, since enemies can attack diagonally, even if two get in front of you, they can kill you almost instantly since you can only target one enemy at a time. If you try to run, to make a bit of space or get some health back—since every time you move, you regain a health point—enemies will hound you relentlessly and sometimes attack before you get a chance to move. It makes for some incredibly quick and unfair deaths.

“Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island takes the form of a ‘turn-based’ roguelike with minor RPG elements.”

There’s almost no strategy to the combat either since it’s a basic one-button affair. At no point did I feel like I was learning how monsters move and telegraph and could adjust accordingly. Monsters move in and swipe. You press A to attack, and you attack the thing in front of you. There are no options for special moves and no defensive manoeuvres; Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is about as basic an RPG as you can get without being text-based.

And because this game is based so heavily around RNG, you might not find any weapons or accessories until you’re a few floors deep, and that’s compounded by the fact you might be subjected to a bad spawn really early on, so I hope you like wiping on the first floor of the dungeon because you’re going to be doing it a lot.

It made the game so incredibly frustrating to play because it never seemed like anything I did would matter. If you think about games like The Binding of Isaac or Hades—without even considering the difference in movement—you’re usually given a special attack on the first floor so you have a very small advantage. You get stronger as the game ramps up the difficulty, but with this game, everything is so random you can never really get a sense of what’s coming next or how to prepare.

There are small ways you can affect how you approach a dungeon: some items can be stored and used at the start of a level, sometimes you’ll find wandering merchants or allies, but it all becomes completely meaningless when you step into an area and are ambushed by enemies that didn’t appear on the map and can swipe away 90% of your health before you make even one move.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “doesn’t this game have a Rescue feature?” Why yes, it does, and it’s terrible. Basically, if you die in a dungeon, you can put a request on the Rescue Board. If someone decides to take on your request, they’ll challenge the dungeon, and if they can make it to your body, you’ll be revived. You wanna know why it’s terrible? Because it works on what is essentially mobile game logic, where you place your request on the board, and the game literally tells you to wait until it’s complete.

You can’t play the game. You have to hope that someone will take it on and let you keep playing. Shiren the Wanderer: Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island even recommends you share the code on social media to help speed up the process, and if you’ve designed a game that you’re encouraging people not to play, you’ve done a bad job. But hey, at least you can use that time waiting to play a good game.

There is a “Rescue Self” option, but it’s as pointless as it is stupid. Basically, you start again from the beginning of the dungeon, from LV.1, with no items, and if you can make it to your corpse, you’ll be allowed to continue. But it’s not so easy, as the game will spawn a ton of monsters around your fallen body, so even this is an uphill battle. It’s an incredibly pointless design—why not just balance the game better or flesh out the combat more instead of having me repeat everything I’ve already done in order to have the chance to continue?

In the audio/visual department, Shiren the Wanderer: Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is just basic. If it had maintained the 16-bit style of its predecessor, I may have at least found it somewhat charming, but this just comes off looking amateur. Animations are single-frame and choppy, Shiren’s walk cycle is slower than his movement, and none of the monsters, characters or levels are particularly memorable.

Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is to roguelikes what those “impossible” levels are to Mario Maker. It’s technically playable, but every design decision seems to be purposefully aggravating for the appearance of a “challenge.” Let me be clear: there is nothing challenging about archaic design, mindless combat, and rubbish RNG.

Do yourself a favour and play Hades, The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon or the whole host of games that have evolved the roguelike genre—do it while you’re waiting for someone to let you continue playing this game.

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