Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a top-down, twin-stick shooter spin-off from the iconic Serious Sam series. Developed by Crackshell and published by Devolver Digital, the game abandons the franchise’s traditional first-person perspective for a 2D, pixel-art style. Players once again take on the role of the titular hero, Sam ‘Serious’ Stone, as he battles through hordes of Mental’s alien forces in an explosive, action-packed adventure. Despite the shift in perspective and visuals, the game retains the series’ signature fast-paced, chaotic gameplay, offering a joyful and explosive experience for action fans.

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour: A Bogus Detour Worth Taking?

In the pantheon of first-person shooters, few franchises are as unapologetically bombastic and gleefully absurd as Croteam’s Serious Sam. A series born from a defiant rejection of the cinematic, story-driven trends of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it stood as a monument to pure, unadulterated chaos. By 2017, the landscape had shifted once more, but the spirit of Sam “Serious” Stone endured, this time through the lens of indie developers tasked with reimagining his madness. Among these spin-offs, one title dared to ask: what happens when you take the essence of a high-tech FPS and cram it into a retro-inspired, top-down twin-stick shooter? The answer is Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour, a game that is both a loving tribute and a fascinating, if flawed, genre experiment.

Development History & Context

From Hammerwatch to Headless Kamikazes: The Birth of a Detour

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour was the brainchild of Crackshell, a small Swedish indie studio founded by former Overkill Software developers. Their previous work, Hammerwatch (2013), was a top-down dungeon crawler heavily inspired by the Gauntlet series, showcasing a knack for crafting expansive levels and systems-driven combat. The genesis of Bogus Detour was as organic as it was unlikely. As recounted by designer Jochum “Hipshot” Skoglund, the team had included a Beheaded Kamikaze—the iconic, screaming suicide bomber from Serious Sam—as an Easter egg in Hammerwatch‘s Temple of the Sun expansion in 2014.

This nod caught the attention of Roman Ribarić, CEO of Serious Sam franchise owner Croteam. A fan of Hammerwatch, Ribarić gave Crackshell his blessing to use the IP’s assets. This casual collaboration soon evolved into a full-blown pitch. Skoglund and an artist quickly mocked up a tech demo titled “2D, Seriously?”, a crude but effective proof-of-concept showcasing Sam from a top-down perspective. Ribarić was impressed, and Croteam granted Crackshell an official license to develop a full game, making Bogus Detour part of the broader Serious Sam Indie Series alongside titles like Double D and The Random Encounter.

Technological Ambition and Indie Constraints

Crackshell, now officially collaborating with Croteam and later partnering with publisher Devolver Digital, set to work. Programmer Niklas “Myran” Myrberg developed a proprietary C++ game engine, later named A000FF, moving away from the C# framework used for Hammerwatch to allow for greater control and performance. This new engine powered a robust level editor and supported the game’s most ambitious technical feat: rendering detailed, 16-angle rotational sprites for weapons and characters. Artist Christian Nordgren achieved this by creating 3D models in Autodesk Maya and rendering them out as 2D sprites, a painstaking process that gave the pixel art a surprising depth and fluidity.

The development philosophy was clear: this couldn’t be a cheap cash-in. Skoglund wanted to prove that a small team could deliver a Serious Sam experience that felt substantial and authentic. He immersed himself in the series’ lore, setting the game’s story as an interquel during the events of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, specifically right after Sam retrieves the Sign of Amon-Ra in the “Metropolis” level. This allowed for a canonical yet self-contained adventure. Furthermore, Croteam’s collaboration provided access to a treasure trove of assets, including audio from Damjan Mravunac, the series’ veteran composer, and the iconic voice of Sam himself, John J. Dick.

Released on June 20, 2017, for Windows and Linux, Bogus Detour entered a market saturated with indie retro-shooters. Yet, it stood apart by being not just a love letter to a classic franchise, but a genuine attempt to translate its DNA into a completely new form.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Story Told Through NETRICSA and One-Liners

If you come to a Serious Sam game for a nuanced narrative, you are, as they say, in the wrong place. The plot of Bogus Detour is a classic MacGuffin chase, serving as the thinnest possible veneer to justify moving from one arena of carnage to the next. The game is set during Sam’s initial time-hopping mission in ancient Egypt. After securing the Sign of Amon-Ra, he discovers the presence of the Mental-Altani Corporation, a planetary mining company allied with the series’ overarching villain, Mental. They are polluting Earth with a “Mutagenic Goo,” and Sam decides to take a—you guessed it—”bogus detour” to stop them.

The narrative is delivered almost exclusively through brief text updates from NETRICSA, Sam’s AI companion. These messages, presented in the series’ classic blue text, provide mission objectives, enemy descriptions, and environmental lore. The primary antagonist is Director Doppler, head of Mental-Altani’s risk-assessment body, whose communications are displayed in ominous red text. Sam’s own contributions are limited to his trademark gruff, one-liner-laden quips, voiced with perfect B-movie bravado by John J. Dick.

Thematic Consistency: Chaos, Humor, and Mayhem

Thematically, Bogus Detour is perfectly in sync with its predecessors. It explores:
* The Absurdity of Power: Sam is a one-man army against impossible odds, a power fantasy pushed to its logical extreme.
* The Folly of Corporate Evil: The Mental-Altani Corporation is a wonderfully silly antagonist—a faceless mining conglomerate whose evil plans are bureaucratic and mustache-twirling in equal measure.
* Nostalgia as a Theme: The game is dripping with referential humor, from its pixel-art aesthetic recalling the 16-bit era to Easter eggs like a hidden, TV-watching Gnaar named Mr. Buttersworth and a cameo from Duke Nukem himself.

The story is not the point; it is the delivery mechanism for the gameplay. It functions effectively, providing context for the shift in locales—from the sun-baked ruins of Egypt to the industrial slaughterhouses of Greece and finally to a high-tech moon base—without ever getting in the way of the action.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: A Symphony of Controlled Chaos

At its heart, Bogus Detour is a twin-stick shooter built upon a dungeon-crawler framework. The core loop is impeccably Serious Sam: enter a vast, open level, explore to find keys and secrets, and trigger massive enemy ambushes that require constant movement, strategic weapon selection, and resource management.

• Combat: The translation of Serious Sam‘s combat to a top-down perspective is Crackshell’s greatest achievement. The dodge-roll mechanic is crucial, replacing the strafe-jumping of the FPS games as the primary method of evasion. Waves of enemies—from Kleer Skeletons to Gnaars to the ever-screaming Beheaded Kamikazes—attack from all directions. The game perfectly captures the series’ signature “circle-strafing” panic, now viewed from above. The arsenal is mostly familiar: dual pistols (with infinite ammo), shotguns, miniguns, rocket launchers, and the iconic SBC Cannon. New additions like the Slicer (which fires ricocheting sawblades) and the Oozegun fit right in.
• Progression & RPG Elements: This is the game’s most significant deviation from the series formula. Enemies drop experience points, and hidden “stars” are scattered throughout levels. Both contribute to a skill point pool used to purchase upgrades across three trees: Combat, Survival, and Weaponry. These perks range from practical (increased ammo capacity, faster movement speed) to transformative (bullets pierce enemies, kills cause explosions). This system adds a layer of strategy and character building, though some purists felt it diluted the pure-skill test of traditional Serious Sam.
• Exploration & Punishment: Levels are enormous, non-linear, and filled with secrets behind destructible walls. However, the game employs a punishing lives system. You start with three lives (represented by sunglasses); losing them all forces a complete level restart. With levels often taking 30-45 minutes to complete, this can lead to frustrating setbacks, especially on higher difficulties. The lack of manual saves reinforces this old-school, high-stakes design philosophy.
• Modes & Modding: Beyond the 10-level campaign, Bogus Detour offers a robust package. Four-player online co-op turns the chaos into a party. A 12-player survival mode and deathmatch offer pure arcade action. Most impressively, a powerful built-in level editor and Steam Workshop support provide near-infinite community-generated content, a feature that extended the game’s lifespan long after release.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Pixel Art Mayhem

The visual direction is a masterclass in adapted style. Crackshell did not simply create generic pixel art; they meticulously translated the Serious Sam universe into 2D. The rotational sprites for weapons and enemies are a technical marvel, ensuring that every cannonball roll and minigun spin feels impactful. The environments are richly detailed, moving from the sandy yellows and stone grays of Egypt to the lurid greens and toxic purples of biological labs, and finally to the sterile whites and metallic blues of the moon base.

The game is also incredibly gory. Enemies explode into chunky pixelated viscera, and the battlefield becomes a permanent canvas of blood and carnage—a feature that can be turned off for the squeamish. The art style successfully captures the over-the-top tone of the franchise while establishing its own distinct, retro-futuristic identity.

A Sonic Assault

The audio design is crucial to the Serious Sam experience, and Bogus Detour delivers. Damjan Mravunac‘s soundtrack is a highlight, blending driving electronic beats with more atmospheric, tension-building tracks. It’s not as instantly iconic as the music from The First Encounter, but it perfectly complements the action.

Most importantly, the sound effects are lifted directly from the mainline games. The roar of the minigun, the thump of the shotgun, and, most critically, the distant scream of an approaching Kamikaze are all present and correct. These audio cues are not just nostalgic; they are vital gameplay information. John J. Dick’s performance as Sam is as reliably cheesy and energetic as ever, though his lines are sparingly used to avoid repetition.

Reception & Legacy

Critical Response: A Successful, if Niche, Translation

Upon release, Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour garnered generally favorable reviews, holding a 76/100 on Metacritic and a 77% average from critics on MobyGames. Critics universally praised the successful translation of the franchise’s core identity into the twin-stick shooter genre.

• Hardcore Gamer (4/5) called it a “perfect translation,” applauding its “gorgeous pixel art” and explosive action.
• Jeuxvideo.com (16/20) deemed it a “successful mix” that captured the series’ fun factor.
• Way Too Many Games (8/10) noted it was “one of the most enjoyable twin-stick shooters I’ve played in recent times.”

Criticism typically focused on the sometimes-tedious backtracking in large levels, the steep difficulty curve, and the divisive progression system. The online multiplayer population also failed to thrive at launch, a common fate for niche titles.

Commercial Failure and a Radical Solution

Despite the positive critical reception, Bogus Detour was a commercial failure. By December 2017, it had failed to recoup its development costs. In a bizarre and unprecedented move, Crackshell, in conjunction with a Bulgarian cracker known as Voksi, created a sanctioned pirated version of the game in March 2018. Distributed on Voksi’s forum, this version included a message encouraging players to buy the game if they enjoyed it. This desperate gambit was a stark indicator of the challenging market for mid-tier indie games, even those backed by a known IP and publisher.

Legacy: The Best of the Spin-Offs

While it may not have been a sales success, Bogus Detour‘s reputation has only grown among fans. Jonathan Kaharl of Hardcore Gaming 101 would later declare it “easily the best of the Serious Sam spin-offs.” Its legacy is one of respectful and competent adaptation. It proved that the core tenets of Serious Sam—large levels, huge enemy counts, powerful weapons, and a irreverent tone—were not tied to the first-person perspective. It stands as a testament to the creative potential of licensed indie projects and remains a hidden gem for fans of both the series and the twin-stick shooter genre.

Conclusion

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a fascinating artifact. It is a game caught between eras: a love letter to the bombastic PC shooters of the early 2000s, built with the tools and sensibilities of the 2010s indie scene, and released into a market that ultimately passed it by. It is not a perfect game; its progression system can feel grindy, its levels occasionally tedious, and its difficulty unrelenting.

Yet, its achievements are undeniable. Crackshell executed its vision with remarkable skill and clear affection for the source material. The translation of Serious Sam‘s chaotic essence into a top-down format is a resounding success, creating a gameplay experience that is both familiar and fresh. The pixel art is superb, the sound design authentic, and the content package generous.

For series fans, it is an essential, if experimental, chapter in Sam’s saga. For fans of twin-stick shooters, it is one of the genre’s most content-rich and challenging entries. Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a detour that, despite its commercial roadblocks, ultimately arrives at a destination worth visiting—a bloody, chaotic, and utterly serious good time.