Now that my Game Pass month is up, it’s back to Steam games (and of course Wargroove got free DLC right after I played it; oh well).

• Snake pAss
  

  6 hours playtime

  15 of 33 achievements

This is a collectathon physics game. You move by holding the right trigger (the left stick just aims your character) and you can hold A to lift your head (the closest you have to a jump in this game, so it’s not really a platformer). You can also push Y to lift your tail in case you need a bit less weight behind you, but beyond that, you only have control over your head; the rest of your body is pure deadweight. Plus, if you aren’t constantly moving left and right, your forward momentum is excruciatingly slow, and I’m not talking about a simple “forward-left, forward-right” march, either: you practically have to be making U-turns to get any decent speed given how large and empty some of the game’s areas are.

The game doesn’t have any enemies or bosses; instead, you’ll be fighting the controls and physics. Most of the game-play involves wrapping yourself around poles to get across pits or reach higher ledges, but it isn’t uncommon for your head to get caught on the pole and suddenly start going the other way around, unraveling yourself in the process (at least half of the times I fell, it was because of this). Later in the game, moving poles get introduced, and the game physics work in such a way that even if you’re completely wrapped around the pole, the simple act of the pole moving will cause you to start unraveling. Sure, you can “grip” by holding the left trigger, but this is the most unreliable mechanic in the game: not only does it slow your movement to a near-standstill, but it doesn’t help with the moving-pole unraveling and makes the head-caught-on-pole reversal even worse! It’s really only useful for pulling switches.

And when the physics do work like you’d expect them to, you’ll notice that wrapping around poles is really all the game has going for it as far as challenge goes. The second world introduces water, but since there are no enemies and you can’t drown, it’s really just an easier way to move vertically. The third world introduces hot coals, but those are just a more forgiving version of the spikes from earlier. The final world introduces wind, and only now do we finally get something that makes the game a bit trickier than getting some of the coins in world 1. You’re still just wrapping around poles, but now you have to keep the wind in mind (and there’s more parts where you need to glide over a pit from one set of poles to another).

However, my least favorite parts of the game were when it dropped trying to be challenging at all and just went full switch-hunt/hidden object mode. Sure, some of the coins (and even bubbles) require trickier-than-normal positioning in order to reach them without falling, but half of them are just “here’s an out-of-the-way alcove that’s basically just a split-path and only requires pointing the camera in the right direction to notice,” and that percentage only gets larger the further you get in the game. It’s even worse when it affects mandatory progress: the third world has a dark red sky, dark coals, and even the grass is tinted with that same darkness, yet the switches remain the same dark red they always are, so even though they aren’t that hard to reach, it may still take you a few minutes to realize “oh wait, the switch I’m missing is right there.”

Overall, this game is okay. It’s about as well polished as a physics game could be (even having a decent difficulty curve if you completely ignore the collectibles), but it’s still a physics game, with all the inherent unreliability that implies. If you’re looking for a game that does something unique, get it on sale.