Welcome to Snake Pass; a physical action-puzzle game that sees the player slither, curl and climb their way through increasingly challenging worlds filled with evermore intricate obstacles and fiendishly mind-bending objectives! Snake Pass is the wriggling brain-child of Seb Liese, who originally came to Sumo from Holland to work on the LittleBigPlanet team. His prototype of ‘real snake physics’ captured the entire studio’s imagination and we’re really proud of the results so far!
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I went in with the expectation it would feel like a 3D game of snake, but it's not that. However it's a very interesting 3D platformer that's traversal if not aesthetic, is fun. I don't care for much of the collectathon elements, and it has a wide range of difficulty, but it's a pretty good idea that was executed fairly well.
Unique. I've never played a game like it. The core mechanic of having to literally 'think like a snake', considering the weight of your whole body, and how it might affect your ability to climb or grip certain surfaces. Reminds me of Subnautica, the way that having full 360 degree movement felt unlike anything I had ever played. SnakePass wasn't quite so revolutionary, but it was very good.
Still going through Game Pass games that are shorter but look neat, I tried out the coincidentally named Snake Pass today. Yet another 3D platformer (of sorts) in a jungle as an animal, it was a choice between this and Super Lucky's Tale the other day, and I'm glad in retrospect I didn't pick this one XP. Though it took me almost twice as long as SLT to get all the collectibles in (around 8 hours), I enjoyed my time with Snake Pass far less.
If you thought that Super Lucky's Tale had a threadbare and unimportant story, just get a load of Snake Pass! The story is so threadbare it may as well not even be there. Doodle the hummingbird comes to wake Noodle the snake after one of the stones to the warp gate in that area of their forest has been dislodged. Noodle and Doodle then go around from area to area putting the stones back and being given very obvious (and very unskippable) cutscenes of who dun it. Even upon replaying a level, cutscenes (the few there are) are unskippable, and the story is otherwise so unimportant to the game that it may as well just not be there and save us the unskippable cutscenes.
The gameplay of Snake Pass is you as Noodle the snake going around and collecting the 3 warp stones in each of 15 levels. Also in each stage are 20 wisps to collect and 5 gatekeeper coins (which are functionally identical. The coins are just usually harder to find/get to). Now you may be asking yourself, "but Pidge, only 15 levels, I know you went for 100% collectibles, but how is that an 8 hour game?" Well, fair reader, the reason is very simple: Noodle is a snake, and for better or worse (usually worse) he controls like one.
Holding RT moves Noodle forward, the left joystick moves his head, and holding A makes him look upward. Holding LT "tightens his muscles", which basically means that your friction increases to whatever you're clinging to, allowing for time for some more precise movements for when platforming gets tricky. The right stick also moves the camera around, and pressing Y makes Doodle grab your tail and hold it up for you (invaluable for lightening your weight if just your head is on a platform and you're desperately trying to get up and not fall). To give the game devs credit, Noodle does genuinely move like a snake. You can't just move in a straight line, as that's not how a snake moves. Winding from side to side makes you speed up, whether you're on the ground or trying to climb up one of the game's many bamboo climbing poles (or trying to Skyrim your way up a rock face you definitely shouldn't be able to but can regardless).
This game's level design is generally fine. The main issue the game has is that the control layout is inexcusably terrible. RB re-positions the camera behind you, sure, but your thumb has SO many jobs between A, Y, and the right stick that there were an uncountable number of times that I died because I couldn't simultaneously raise my head and call for Doodle, or keep my head raised and reposition the camera to see what I was even doing. There is absolutely no reason you cannot re-bind the buttons, there is no reason lifting your head couldn't also be LB, heck I think the B button literally does nothing, so who the heck knows why calling Doodle is bound to Y and not B (X is for diving in water).
The game's main challenge and conceit is that it's awkward and difficult to control, and the bad controller layout does not help that. But this isn't a game where awkward controls are part of the silly design of the game like Surgeon Simulator or Octodad. Ohhhhh no. This is just THE GAME. World 2 (out of 4) is probably the hardest part of the game because suddenly the game forces you, not even for extra collectibles, to master how to cross a horizontal climbing beam and the nearest checkpoint is quite far away. It does not surprise me even remotely, looking at the achievement stats, that so few people who play this game actually finish world 2, let alone beat the game (heck I think even beating world 1 is something less than 10% of players have done).
Most of what could be called the fun levels are the first four that make up the game's first world. After that, the kid gloves are off, and the game starts upping the challenge just enough with each stage that you constantly need to reevaluate just how well you've learned to control Noodle, and it's never not frustrating. Dying is an ever constant part of this game as you wrestle with the control layout, the control design, and the not always clear physics of how Noodle moves. The only saving grace is that respawns are so quick, but the pain in the butt is that checkpoints are not so frequent (although thank goodness you can reuse them as many times as you want).
Verdict: Not Recommended. Snake Pass feels like a student project about snake movement that was pushed into being a full-fledged game before they actually had the main meat of it fully thought out. "Surgeon Sim, but a challenging platformer" is a pretty bad look for any game, but it's really the only way I can describe this. If you have it for free through Game Pass like I did, maybe it'd be worth your time if you have genuinely nothing else to do, as conquering the game's awkward controls does feel rewarding (and that rewarding feeling is honestly the best part of the game), but I would never say you should pay money for Snake Pass. Your time and money are almost certainly spent on some other indie game, because Snake Pass is largely just a ticket to frustration.
If you thought that Super Lucky's Tale had a threadbare and unimportant story, just get a load of Snake Pass! The story is so threadbare it may as well not even be there. Doodle the hummingbird comes to wake Noodle the snake after one of the stones to the warp gate in that area of their forest has been dislodged. Noodle and Doodle then go around from area to area putting the stones back and being given very obvious (and very unskippable) cutscenes of who dun it. Even upon replaying a level, cutscenes (the few there are) are unskippable, and the story is otherwise so unimportant to the game that it may as well just not be there and save us the unskippable cutscenes.
The gameplay of Snake Pass is you as Noodle the snake going around and collecting the 3 warp stones in each of 15 levels. Also in each stage are 20 wisps to collect and 5 gatekeeper coins (which are functionally identical. The coins are just usually harder to find/get to). Now you may be asking yourself, "but Pidge, only 15 levels, I know you went for 100% collectibles, but how is that an 8 hour game?" Well, fair reader, the reason is very simple: Noodle is a snake, and for better or worse (usually worse) he controls like one.
Holding RT moves Noodle forward, the left joystick moves his head, and holding A makes him look upward. Holding LT "tightens his muscles", which basically means that your friction increases to whatever you're clinging to, allowing for time for some more precise movements for when platforming gets tricky. The right stick also moves the camera around, and pressing Y makes Doodle grab your tail and hold it up for you (invaluable for lightening your weight if just your head is on a platform and you're desperately trying to get up and not fall). To give the game devs credit, Noodle does genuinely move like a snake. You can't just move in a straight line, as that's not how a snake moves. Winding from side to side makes you speed up, whether you're on the ground or trying to climb up one of the game's many bamboo climbing poles (or trying to Skyrim your way up a rock face you definitely shouldn't be able to but can regardless).
This game's level design is generally fine. The main issue the game has is that the control layout is inexcusably terrible. RB re-positions the camera behind you, sure, but your thumb has SO many jobs between A, Y, and the right stick that there were an uncountable number of times that I died because I couldn't simultaneously raise my head and call for Doodle, or keep my head raised and reposition the camera to see what I was even doing. There is absolutely no reason you cannot re-bind the buttons, there is no reason lifting your head couldn't also be LB, heck I think the B button literally does nothing, so who the heck knows why calling Doodle is bound to Y and not B (X is for diving in water).
The game's main challenge and conceit is that it's awkward and difficult to control, and the bad controller layout does not help that. But this isn't a game where awkward controls are part of the silly design of the game like Surgeon Simulator or Octodad. Ohhhhh no. This is just THE GAME. World 2 (out of 4) is probably the hardest part of the game because suddenly the game forces you, not even for extra collectibles, to master how to cross a horizontal climbing beam and the nearest checkpoint is quite far away. It does not surprise me even remotely, looking at the achievement stats, that so few people who play this game actually finish world 2, let alone beat the game (heck I think even beating world 1 is something less than 10% of players have done).
Most of what could be called the fun levels are the first four that make up the game's first world. After that, the kid gloves are off, and the game starts upping the challenge just enough with each stage that you constantly need to reevaluate just how well you've learned to control Noodle, and it's never not frustrating. Dying is an ever constant part of this game as you wrestle with the control layout, the control design, and the not always clear physics of how Noodle moves. The only saving grace is that respawns are so quick, but the pain in the butt is that checkpoints are not so frequent (although thank goodness you can reuse them as many times as you want).
Verdict: Not Recommended. Snake Pass feels like a student project about snake movement that was pushed into being a full-fledged game before they actually had the main meat of it fully thought out. "Surgeon Sim, but a challenging platformer" is a pretty bad look for any game, but it's really the only way I can describe this. If you have it for free through Game Pass like I did, maybe it'd be worth your time if you have genuinely nothing else to do, as conquering the game's awkward controls does feel rewarding (and that rewarding feeling is honestly the best part of the game), but I would never say you should pay money for Snake Pass. Your time and money are almost certainly spent on some other indie game, because Snake Pass is largely just a ticket to frustration.
Kendinizi yılan yaptığınız oyun. O kadar.
Kontrollerin kanser olması da o nedenle, sanırım.
Kontrollerin kanser olması da o nedenle, sanırım.
got this on my switch when nothing else was out for the console. honestly not too bad
I can't do it. I have no idea what I'm doing, and the snake just goes all over the place. It's like trying to piss when you're sloshed.