The main appeal to the Serious Sam franchise has always been its chaotic action of mowing down tons and tons of enemies. The latest entry in the series, Serious Sam 4, is no different and looks to be giving you exactly what you’d expect. But Sam will be part of a story, too, and it seems it’s going for something specific.
Speaking with PC Gamer, writer Jonas Kyratzes spoke in depth about the game’s story. There he described it as something of a B-movie, but also one that was sincere. He said the team aimed to create an overall positive human story that goes from silly to serious with more personal stakes than previous titles. You can see a bit of that tone in the latest trailer that highlighted the game’s story through here.
“It’s not exactly that narrative is more important in Serious Sam 4,” Kyratzes said. “It’s not a game that is structured differently than previous Sam games. It’s not that we tried to take a Sam game and then make a narrative Sam game out of it, because that would be weird. It’s more that it was an attempt to—without trying to disparage the previous games in any way—to do it better.
“It was an experience that needed characters, a villain, a sense of events happening in the world. The thing was just to try to do it well. It’s still a game that’s primarily an action game, it still plays like any classic Sam game, it’s just an attempt to also do the sort of B-movie kind of story that it does, but to do it well, to do it in an entertaining, clever, and hopefully charming sort of way.
“This is more personal. The whole game is more personal. You’ve got your friends there, the stakes are more personal—its the whole Earth being destroyed obviously, but also the people you care about. You see Sam actually joking around with people, and he’s still very recognizably Serious Sam, but he has actual friendships, he has people he cares about.
“This is a completely sincere take. It’s silly, it’s goofy in places, it’s serious in places too. It has moments of proper humanity, between the characters but also between what Sam stands for and what the villain stands for.”
Serious Sam 4 will launch on PC and Google Stadia on September 24th. You can check out the requirements for the PC version through here. There are console versions of the game slated for some time in 2021.
