Imagine waking up in a world overrun by a mysterious toxic substance with a strange device attached to your arm. Will you gather the courage to explore and survive, or simply wait for your demise? One thing is clear: you need Serum to prolong your life. How you find it is up to you.
Serum’s week-long playtest recently came to a close and we were lucky enough to have been invited. Serum is an upcoming open-world, horror, first-person survival game where you must mix and match chemicals to unlock your progress through the world and empower the strange liquid that is keeping you alive.
Serum boasts a mysterious world to explore with varying biomes that offer a diverse range of killer fauna and flora, all powered by Unreal Engine 5. There is a crafting system that will enable the player to create tools, traps and weapons to help them expand their “safe zone.” At the heart of the game lies the mysterious serum that flows through your veins. There is a brewing system that allows the player to experiment with numerous variations aimed at enhancing abilities specific to one’s play style.
What can be enhanced? Numerous weapons, such as clubs, spears, and arrows, that are ranged, melee, and thrown. The player then uses these enhancements to gain the upper hand over the mutant abominations that prowl the island.
Resource management also needs to be taken into account; this is meant to be a survival horror, of course. The player not only has to fight against their environment while watching their health and stamina but also against the game’s internal clock and the side effects of the serum itself.
But what is the current state of the game? What improvements can be made? Here’s what our playtester had to say:
The game seems like it has promise, but is currently missing some really key components, namely a minimap and a flashlight (the game is way too dark not to have a flashlight either available immediately or craftable in the tutorial). The visuals are very Rust or Sons of the Forest – and it is a pretty game that performs shockingly well for a playtest – but the gameplay feels more like Don’t Starve than anything else, which is probably gonna bias me a little against it since I didn’t like Don’t Starve.
Like Don’t Starve, the game feels like combat or stealth is something you want to do as little of as possible, instead focusing on moving as quickly as you can from objective to objective while snagging as many resources as you can find because you’re constantly worried about your dwindling timer. But the way game progression is designed, it feels like the devs want this to be a combat game given how all the advanced serums are a bunch of combat-focused buffs and unlocking blueprints for better gear and serums seems to be the only real progression metric in the game.
The tone also seems a little conflicted. It plays like something between an open-world survival game and a story-driven horror game. The initial cinematic pushes this idea that you shouldn’t be thinking about building survival mechanisms, you should be thinking of escape because you have a sickly, dying child who needs you – pushing an urgency similar to a traditional, narrative horror game – but your first mission after the tutorial is finding some fast travel waypoints so you can comfortably travel around and gather resources, killing that sense of urgency.
Serum is about to enter Early Access on the 23rd of May, so feedback is currently being implemented from the playtest and will continue to be implemented until full launch, meaning that the devs can hopefully turn this into an amazing survival horror. The parts are all there and Serum has the potential to please its (rather niche) audience. Here’s to hoping. If you would like to see some gameplay and read more about the game, please follow the links below. Thanks for reading and as always, stay sordid.
Official Steam page.
Official Discord channel.
