what the heck is Serious Sam The Greek Encounter

(reposting an infodump from my personal tumblr just to get a feel for how writing blog posts on here works!  and also bc this will automatically be a little easier to find for people curious about this game)

was gonna start playing serious sam Tonight, but i held off so i could show it to friends, so instead to feed the special interest i went to the list of spinoffs on wikipedia to decide which one i’ll look into next.  only to realize suddenly that one of them, the greek encounter, is the only one on the list to not have a wikipedia article.  i looked at the wikia, which does have an article on it, but it’s incredible bare.  so i thought.  Hey.  What The Fuck.  What Is This And Why Is There So Little Information On It.  And Why Does He Look Like That.  from there it literally only took me about 10 minutes (about the length of a non-speedrun playthrough of the game) to find all possible information on it and i’m going to compile it here, because i’m very autistic, and also so maybe someone down the line also haunted by this face will come across this and find peace

tl;dr you can’t find much about this game because there genuinely just ain’t all that much to find

Serious Sam The Greek Encounter is a top-down shooter made as part of the Serious Sam Indie Series by eric ruth games, apparently as a commission from devolver digital.  the other thing from eric ruth games you’re most likely to have heard of is the avgn game.  idr much about the avgn game but this isn’t as, like, high-quality as what i can recall.  here’s literally the entire game (i hope this embed works, if it doesn't go here)

not, like, offensively bad, but really short and forgettable, y’know?  but i went on a little investigation on how it could possibly be THIS forgotten, because a) there’s not even any official links to download it and the unofficial links took me… til right as the video hit the start of the final stage where i had it playing in the corner at 1.25x speed, funny enough, and b) not even the eric ruth games website acknowledges that this ever existed, despite making the logo super prominent within.  this got me INTRIGUED.

well there wasn’t anything to be intrigued about.  it’s just because it was only distributed through desura.  a website i’d never heard of before, but apparently was formerly a digital video game storefront for a while until a couple changes of owners lead to it turning into your usual sketchy flash game site.  as the greek encounter isn’t really much of anything, probably was priced low and sold little while it was available (edit- finally got wayback machine to let me find it, it was literally $0.99 lol), it’s understandable that nobody would go through the trouble of putting it up somewhere else, or acknowledge it for that matter (even if that part feels a lil mean to me- this ain’t at postal 3 levels or anything man c’monnnn)

not much to write home about.  kinda bland.  saw somebody call it “easily the worst serious sam game” while i was looking into this though and i wouldn’t go that far due to the contempt i hold in my heart for serious sam 3 and the first half of serious sam 2.  it’s just kind of a Nothing game is all.  wish the box art wouldn’t haunt me any time i go to update my tierlist though.  i’m not linking that download i mentioned earlier in the post here bc it’s a google drive and google drives of piracy love going down at the worst possible time but just know that i’m keeping a zip file of this on hand

anyways there’s only one speedrun of this so you know what i’mmmm thinking of doing for my first foray into speedrunning