Swords and Serpents is a fantasy role-playing video game developed by Interplay for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In this game, the player controls a party of four adventurers on a dungeon-crawling quest to destroy a terrible serpent. Along the way, the party encounters an onslaught of fantasy monsters and collects gold and treasure while gaining experience points needed to raise their individual attributes.

The player navigates through a crude representation of a dungeon, presented in split-screen format which allows the player to simultaneously view the dungeon from a first-person perspective and a simple map of the current level showing the partys location. Encounters with monsters occur randomly, during which the map is replaced by gauges representing the creatures health. During fights the player controls the characters actions to attack, cast magic spells, or flee. The entire game takes place in an underground dungeon composed of 16 levels, with the serpent at the bottom.