i love noodle ssso much🐍 he’s ssso cute ☺️ i need a plush of him immediately. the 8 bit version of him is cute too. i love messing with his funny facesss lol im glad they made him cartoony and not too realistic looking its more fun :)
and i love that he’s a vegetarian even though he's a dangerous venomous snake lmao

i have just two words for people who find this game too difficult:
• git
• gud
lol idk i think i have a sssnake brain because this game just came sssso naturally to me lol it gave me what i never knew i needed from platforming. its weird it hadnt been made decades ago…
i love how nonlinear the gameplay is. theres no one way to finish a level and theres no one way to navigate all the obstacles.
i kept thinking the game was getting easier but it was just because i kept doing the difficult side challenges first lol
i slipped on ice and ripped up my knuckle making holding a controller a pain along with cat scratches on my other finger and i still had a great time lmao
it’s hilarious watching negative review videos of this game and people are whining about something being hard or whatever and i can literally see in my head the controller and the buttons this person is not pressing to get through something and its always because theyre not interested in learning how to play. theyre not patiently or carefully slithering around the very helpful poles given to them because they want to run and jump and not slither.
the gameplay is great yall just suck at it lol like sorry i enjoy learning a fun new type of gameplay and i dont just play dumb indistinguishable murder simulators or mediocre pokemon sequels or whatever. if youre not into platformers then okay thats fair. but like idk how anyone who enjoys platformers would not enjoy this if they give it a chance and embrace it for what it is? whatever. their loss lol

my only major issue (and tbh its sort of just a minor issue) with the game was the scenery. i love the jungle temple setting but its got just a little too much detail with the plants & decorative temple shit that the camera gets stuck on or it has plants and stones that cover the camera. and swimming underwater is hard to see with all the seaweed and stone blocks everywhere.
also doodle the hummingbird was annoying af always flying in front of the camera i just wanted to violently swat it away. using doodle for help is sorta of like bumpers in bowling. like most often i could do the whole levels without doodle and i just used it out of laziness at times wanting to climb up faster because it was offered lol but like as a last second savior i didnt really need it because this game just came very naturally to me. but i wish it was a dragonfly (even if thats kind of copying sparx the dragonfly from spyro lol) but like i just wanted something smaller and less intrusive on the camera. its even worse when you switch to the 8 bit cosmetic skins and its just a big block in front of the screen -_-
there was a moment where i got a collectable only because i cheated and climbed up a decorative statue that i shouldnt have been able to climb on . if the setting was designed with a little less decorations it wouldnt have been a problem. theres nothing wrong with a little editing guys. the primary appeal here is the gameplay you dont need to do so much to sell it with the art design...
also the decorative floating islands you cant get to needed a different design to better show that theyre not meant to be accessible. they have skull warning signs on them but its not enough because i dont always see them and sometimes end up wasting a minute trying to figure out how to get to a decorative island thats not supposed to be accessible so it makes it confusing where ive been and where i need to go. and theres tops of structures with nothing on them and im like ? why is this here? idk some of it may be a place they put the fruit in arcade mode? i didnt play that too much really tho so i wouldnt know. like its fine tho thats just nitpick it didnt ruin the game.

the checkpoint system was a tiny issue when i forgot what stuff id collected and id think id gotten something then turns out i died during that life lol some of my post game 100% completion task to finish it was just re-collecting stuff id already gotten but forgot to recollect after dying. but it wasnt like bad and only happened a few times. i guess it just should have always saved the collectables whenever youre fully on a flat grass area and leave the checkpoint respawn stones only for a place to go after you die. thats just another little nitpick tho its nothing that frustrating really lol and it only matters if youre a weirdo completionist like me. if youve done all the challenges you care to do and dont care to 100% the game it doesnt matter.
the game works best if you go through all the levels first just focusing on the keystones then do the bubble and coin collectables in the post game for more challenges.

the intro is kinda weird having noodle already on these floating islands? its an odd start like do they live there? lol
like it doesnt matter really. its not a flaw and im not asking for a story to this game (cringe) because thats not the appeal here. but a little cutscene of noodle and doodle arriving at a portal that teleports them up to the floating islands wouldve made more sense to me. but i guess since noodle is a vegetarian he doesnt need to hunt animals if he lives on the floating islands lol whatever.

the 4 elements theme to the 4 worlds is cute. the names of the gods of each world are funny :p
i wish theyd utilized the elements more for each world because its sorta just art design and doesnt affect the gameplay very much.

i like that theres no villians or dumb boss fights or conflicts of any kind. its just lighthearted platforming fun :) it makes the challenges more relaxed. theres no dumb timers or anything to stress you out.

the soundtrack was done by the guy that did the donkey kong country soundtracks so of course thats a plus. i love the water world music. its so groovy and chill :P

the last level had several glitches where id die while sitting idle on grass ? or the hummingbird would throw me off a cliff instead of transporting me to another platform? it fixed itself when i reloaded the level but still it was odd…

i like that the game gives you the sssssuper ssssspecial sssssnake vision post game to find missing collectables easier so you never have to look up anything online. i hate when a game requires or inspires outside help to complete it. a game should always make it clear what you have to do within the game itself. it should always be a self contained experience.

the arcade mode and time trial modes are kinda boring to me. i never understood the appeal of speed running? whatever. happy for ppl who enjoy that but idgaf.

i waited 2 years to buy this on sale and ended up only paying $1.50 for it because of the sale and an added discount from buying other eshop games lmao but i wouldve gladly bought it full price.

so yea this was definitely one of my top favorite gamesss :)
as cynthia harrell would say in beginning of the theme song to metal gear solid 3 sssnake eater:
"what a thrill..."
🐍
✌🏻

То самое чувство, когда игра кажется хорошей, но на самом деле, является аппаратом по вырабатывания стресса.
Игры должны приносить наслаждение, чего я не могу сказать об этом детище Sumo studios. Основной проблемой является криво работающая механика. Невозможно ни нормально проползти под мостом на шесте, ни чего другого. Управление раздражает, другого сказать не могу. Игра либо для ОЧЕНЬ терпеливых, либо для тех, кто по ошибке или не знанию купил эту игру.
Визуально, игра выглядит приятно, музыка не навязчивая. Крайне на любителя.

Positives:

- Interesting innovation on the Platforming genre that controls well.
- Very characteristic and a beautiful game all around.
- There are enough checkpoints to reduce the frustration from failure.

Negatives:
- The novelty wears off too quickly, with little changes made to keep it appealing.
- Levels become very, very long and just drag on as a result.
- Minor camera issues.

-----------------------------------

Snake Pass is an incredibly tough game for me to review because I am very mixed on it. On one hand I want to recommend it for the innovation it brought to the genre, and on the other hand, I want it to stay the hell away from me. That is a slight overexaggeration of course, but it's not too far from the truth. But let me begin by going into detail on what I like about Snake Pass.

Snake Pass is a charming platformer where one key feature is missing: jumping. Instead, you're a snake who gets higher up the stage by wriggling and coiling around wooden poles. Noodle is a long snake, so it is important that his entire body makes the movement to push him forward. This results in a physics-based game, and I can say that the controls are pretty good. The camera can sometimes be a hindrance though, but it happened only a select amount of times for me. Of course, it still revolves around physics which usually leads to frustration, and Snake Pass is no exception to that. The game gradually becomes harder, and deaths are becoming more and more frequent. Fortunately checkpoints are usually nearby more difficult sections so the reset is pretty much imminent.

But me throwing my controller through the room out of frustration is not the reason I partially dislike this game. That reason is simply because the novelty wears off really quickly. Pole climbing is the entire game, and it barely ever changes from that. Sure, it becomes more difficult, but a lot of it is still pole climbing. The only changes to the gameplay are some switches to use and a few stage hazards, and that's it. Is that an issue when the pole climbing itself is good? Not necessarily, but the levels themselves really begin to drag on the further into the game you are. They become very long, frustrating, and just very sameish. While the first few levels were all very fun because this idea was fresh and new, the later levels just weren't fun to go through. And we are talking about 3 to 4 hours of content here, not necessarily including completion. And besides, Noodle is just a very slow character to control, even when constantly wriggling to increase speed. If the gameplay evolved then I probably would have liked this game a lot more, but now? I can recommend it for two hours and that's it. But recommending a 20 euro game for 2 hours doesn't exactly sound ideal so I hate to say it but I'm sorry. I would love to recommend this for the concept alone, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend people to go out and buy it.

Looking back in recent memory, I can’t think of a single year that’s more stacked with incredible games than 2017. It felt like both indies and triple A developers were pumping out hit after hit: Breath of the Wild, Cuphead, Nier Automata, Nex Machina, Sonic Mania… we could go on and on. As excited as I was for all of these titles however, there was something even bigger on my mind: the revival of the 3D platformer, my childhood genre. 2017 absolutely delivered in spades, with some instant favorites (A Hat in Time), some flawed yet interesting gems (Skylar & Plux), some daunting reinventions that I played a bit of and didn’t finish for some reason or another (Super Mario Odyssey), and some of the 3D platformers of all time (Yooka Laylee).

In the midst of all of this chaos, was Snake Pass. I’d been following the game from its inception to launch day, and bought it without a second thought at the end of March. You play as a cute happy snake named Noodle slithering your way through abandoned yet breathtaking ruins in the wilderness accompanied by a David Wise soundtrack (which by the way, is probably his most overlooked contribution, please give it some love); how the hell could I possibly dislike this? Yet, I found myself getting filtered within a few days; Noodle just felt a bit too sluggish on the ground, and I couldn’t figure out why I kept slipping and falling from the dangling bamboo poles, constantly respawning and losing all my collectible progress because it wasn’t saved until I manually touched checkpoints. So, I shelved it unceremoniously, and wouldn’t pick it back up until many years later.

Let it be known; 2017 me was an idiot. Snake Pass slaps.

The world wasn’t ready for Snake Pass. I wasn’t ready for Snake Pass. I came in expecting a classic 3D platformer collectathon, with tons of jumping, climbing, and grabbing. I was ready for some combat here and there via tons of scattered minions and flashy boss fights, and of course, was mentally prepared for plenty of gimmick levels in the form of vehicle sections, card/fishing minigames, and maybe a turret or twinstick shooter or two. As is, I think we’ve just taken for granted how formulaic much of the genre has become from its predecessors, and that’s totally fine considering the nostalgia that’s baked into these projects.

What I got instead, was a deconstruction of every convention of the genre as we know it. There’s no “jump” button, because you’re a goddamn snake. Instead, you must rely on three basic forms of movement to cling and glide through various floating isles of peril, filled with spike traps, smoldering coals, illuminative pools, and tons of harrowing gaps of thin air itself. The analog stick controls your head on a horizontal axis relative to the camera (think: moving left and right), the A button tilts Noodle’s head up (while it naturally slumps down due to gravity), and the right trigger moves Noodle forward. The controls are deceptively simple to pick up, but quite difficult to master, and successfully navigating and climbing your way through the separated platform obstacle courses while picking up every collectible and utilizing Noodle’s body to the fullest extent is one hell of a challenge that no other game has ever attempted, much less pulled off.

One of the game’s most well known mottos is “think like a snake;” that is, you can’t approach Snake Pass the same way that you’d approach your classic humanoid mascot 3D platformer. Noodle’s body behind the controllable head is both your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. See, the body actually consists of 35 connected sphere segments much more similarly to that of a real snake, and the game constantly checks to see if these spheres are in contact with a surface or one another. That’s why the classic S shape slither and curviness of the snake’s body is crucial for maintaining speed. It then follows that as this giant interconnected body, if the head moves in one direction, the body will naturally follow too. As such, the body and the head must be considered in tandem to both move Noodle along platforms/structures and anchor Noodle to contraptions so he doesn’t fall off. The possibilities that stem from this are endless; you can dangle the tail from a rotating pole to collect wisps, you could use your tail to propel Noodle up onto a wall and “slither up,” you could wrap Noodle’s tail around a stationary pole and then slowly extend the head and wrap that head around another pole to complete the transfer, and so much more.

Let me put this all in context with an example to better demonstrate the creativity that Snake Pass’s physics and controls allow for. Consider the following segment made up of a wind tunnel and a bamboo awning in front of the wind tunnel, with the wind currents flowing in the direction towards the bamboo awning. The goal here is to collect the red keystone (one of three) to unlock the portal, but of course, it’s no easy task considering the wind will quickly destabilize Noodle and blow him into the abyss.

So what’s the best approach to take? Do you start slithering on the pole structure and wrap Noodle’s body around the closest vertical pole to the red keystone, slowly extending his head until he contacts the keystone? Do you “climb up” the small ridge to the wind tunnel’s front-left and quickly extract the red keystone from the side? Or, do you take the stylish approach and slither up and behind the wind tunnel, “falling” into the wind tunnel core and being blown into the red keystone and quickly wrapping around one of the poles after exiting the wind tunnel to avoid falling off? I’ve tested all three of these approaches and as it turns out, I've found all three to be completely viable. Simply put, if the problem is collecting wisps, keystones, and coins while successfully exploiting Noodle’s body to avoid falling/dying, then the engine and controls absolutely give the player many forms of viable solutions with little, if any railroading into the “correct” choice.

To add onto the degree of freedom allowed, there are two additional tools that further flip the concept of Snake Pass on its head and allow for even more variety with their own respective downsides. Firstly, the left trigger will cause Noodle to tense up and is referred to as the “grip;” doing so will tighten Noodle’s entire body and make it easier for Noodle to stay anchored to pole structures, especially useful during various parts with rotating pole contraptions where gravity becomes enemy #1. The cost here is that doing so will of course, stifle Noodle’s motility, so figuring out when to hold grip and to let go when moving onto the next obstacles is key to avoid getting too complacent and getting stuck in unfavorable situations.

The second additional tool comes in the form of Noodle’s companion, a hummingbird named Doodle. Pressing the Y button will cause Doodle to pick up Noodle’s tail, which is extremely useful in a jam when you need to reduce the weight of Noodle’s body for movement or elevate the tail onto a platform or pole. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve successfully had Doodle do this to avoid slipping off of platform edges and successfully slither back onto safe ground. The con here is that by taking away the active weight of Noodle’s tail, you won’t be able to use Noodle’s tail as an anchor to remain attached to pole structures or as a coil/pedestal to propel Noodle up walls and ledges. Thus, this push and pull through Snake Pass’s physics and various “safety nets” forces players to think critically of how to best control and exploit Noodle’s movement to successfully navigate the dangerous environments.

I’ve joked about this in the past with friends, in that I consider Snake Pass to be the ideal streaming game; that is, I've always found this game to be interesting to both play and stream. When players pick up the controller for the first time, it’s an often frustrating (and admittingly pretty funny) experience. They constantly find themselves sliding off of poles due to not properly anchoring the body onto structures, or bonking the head onto walls and poles while climbing up & down and slipping into the abyss, or perhaps reflecting my aforementioned annoyance at how slow Noodle seems at first if you’re not actively utilizing the slither pattern on the ground. I’m not going to pretend that the game is perfect either; I understand the obsession for wanting to collect every single thing in the stage and losing progress over and over to deaths (even if upon my replays, I did find that checkpoints are not spaced as far apart as I remember and there’s no real benefit to collecting everything at once; Snake Vision to quickly point out collectibles is unlocked after beating the game initially), and mastering the controls and methodology to the climbing and gripping is definitely a hefty endeavor.

Having said that, once I did get a hang of the controls and problem solving of snagging collectibles without untimely doom, I became really affectionate towards the experience itself. It’s really hard to put down what “good” gamefeel is like, but once it finally clicked, the fluidity and sheer absurdity of what I was able to do with Noodle brought upon this visceral satisfaction that I honestly can’t say many games have been able to match. The closest comparison I can bring to mind is finally figuring out how to “fall” into everything in Gravity Rush Remastered rapid-fire or the sheer number of tricks I was able to successfully perform while sliding and skating around in Jet Set Radio Future. If you're curious, just take a quick look at some of the insane shit they're able to pull off in a speedrun back in 2018. Even the game leans into this, with much of the replay value coming from 100%ing by snagging all the collectibles, as well as an unlockable speedrun mode and arcade mode to further put your execution to the test. As trite as this sounds, there’s really no other game that does what Snake Pass accomplishes, and while the learning curve may be steep, I think there’s real value in niche games like this that are easy to pick up yet difficult to master.

So please don’t make the same mistake that I made. Snake Pass is a bold and radical reinvention of everything the 3D platformer stood for, and in many ways was and still is one of the biggest shocks the gaming industry has ever had. It’s a perfect example of how subtraction can lead to innovation, of how satisfaction can stem not just from speed but also from mastery, and as a calculated and focused product compared to many of its peers, it's an emblematic example of how trying to do something different yet realized is exactly the kind of shake-up that we never knew we needed, but absolutely should desperately want and support.

We don’t deserve Snake Pass, but for what it's worth, I'll always be grateful that we have it.

Sources referenced:

How Snake Pass Works

Snake Pass Biology: Getting Technical

The Story of Snake Pass

Snake Pass - Nitro Rad

The Story of Snake Pass' Origin from Creator Seb Liese

Snake Pass - How to Play

Game Analysis | Snake Pass - Reinventing Locomotion

Cute "platform" game. Very interesting movement mechanics (you can't jump at all and you have to move just like a snake does). Reminds me of N64-era Rare games, both in terms of design and visuals. Definitively not as difficult as some reviews out there claim, the game just doesn't hold your hand.
If you are remotely interested in snakes and games with the charm of early 3D platformers (with modern sensibilities), it's definitely worth playing.

Jogo de plataforma bonitinho. Mecânicas de movimento muito interessantes (você não consegue pular e você precisa se mover da mesma forma que uma cobra). Lembra os jogos da Rare da época do Nintendo 64, tanto em termos de design quanto de visual. Definitivamente não é tão difícil quanto algumas resenhas por aí afirmam, o jogo simplesmente não segura sua mão.
Se você é remotamente interessado em cobras e jogos com o charme de plataformers 3D iniciais (com sensibilidades modernas), definitivamente vale a pena jogar.

This game made my fingers feel like a pretzel. It feels like a modern-day rendition of QWOP, but this time with lush environments, an extremely catchy soundtrack by David Wise, and an adorable cartoon snake.

The game's main draw is its unorthodox control scheme, and how the levels are built around being a snake. All of the levels are inventive in their own way, and all have a smattering of collectibles to find along the way. Unfortunately, many of the later stages really felt like they began to overstay their welcome, and there's only 15 levels on top of that, so the game is simultaneously too short AND exhausting to play.

I'd say this game is still worth a shot, but I can tell it won't click with a lot of people. I still enjoyed myself though.