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
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
12 Comments
Why I never heard about this game? I added to my wishlist. All you said made me want to give it a try. Amazing job you did here introducing this game.
thanks for the soundtrack recommendation, that's some damn good stuff
I think I own this game on like 3 consoles but this is the first I've ever heard anyone actually talk about it. You're probably right though, I don't think I would have even been ready for what you described until this year.
Guess the backlog grows.
Guess the backlog grows.
If I'm remembering right, I discovered this game via an episode from Game Maker's Tool Kit on Youtube. There were some episodes on really smart design in games and this was one of those where I watched it and fell in love immediately.
@Pkshyguy: I don't think I've even managed to tackle 20% of the amazing games from 2017, the backlog for that year goes so deep. One of these days, I should do a mini-challenge tackling lesser known games from the year and see where that brings me. I'll be eagerly anticipating your thoughts on Snake Pass if you choose to try it out!
@LeonardoMF93: Thank you! It's my pleasure to let more people in on one of my personal favorites, as divisive as it was back when it released.
@HylianBran: David Wise just can't make bad soundtracks it seems. The easiest way to make me interested in a new game is to tell me the game's cel-shaded, or David Wise was commissioned to handle the compositions.
@cdmcgwire: Yeah, now that I think about it, Snake Pass has actually been given away for free quite a few times and been included in several bundles here and there. I swear that's not a testament to the quality however, because I can only imagine that Snake Pass was a tough sell to casual audiences and that critical consensus didn't help either, so I don't blame the developers for finding more ways to let others try out their game.
@NegFactor: Interesting that you bring that up, because I started following Game Maker's Tool Kit on Youtube not too long ago, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had a video talking about the game design. Seemed like fortuitous timing, as I've been playing Snake Pass on and off for a while almost like it's comfort food (a far cry from my initial aggravations when I first bought it in 2017), and it just seemed like the right time to re-review this game with added context that my friends and I first treated like a meme, but that I've genuinely grown to adore.
@LeonardoMF93: Thank you! It's my pleasure to let more people in on one of my personal favorites, as divisive as it was back when it released.
@HylianBran: David Wise just can't make bad soundtracks it seems. The easiest way to make me interested in a new game is to tell me the game's cel-shaded, or David Wise was commissioned to handle the compositions.
@cdmcgwire: Yeah, now that I think about it, Snake Pass has actually been given away for free quite a few times and been included in several bundles here and there. I swear that's not a testament to the quality however, because I can only imagine that Snake Pass was a tough sell to casual audiences and that critical consensus didn't help either, so I don't blame the developers for finding more ways to let others try out their game.
@NegFactor: Interesting that you bring that up, because I started following Game Maker's Tool Kit on Youtube not too long ago, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had a video talking about the game design. Seemed like fortuitous timing, as I've been playing Snake Pass on and off for a while almost like it's comfort food (a far cry from my initial aggravations when I first bought it in 2017), and it just seemed like the right time to re-review this game with added context that my friends and I first treated like a meme, but that I've genuinely grown to adore.
this review singlehandedly made me want to play this game lol
I didn’t like it or get the hang of it but seeing someone like something so much makes me happy
good shit, good on you & good review
good shit, good on you & good review
It is me who has to thank you =)
@gman: Glad to be of service, I'm always looking forward to see how others' thoughts on Snake Pass
@appreciations: Thank you so much! I totally get that Snake Pass is not everyone's thing, as it can be pretty hard to pick up casually (especially if they follow the tradition of trying to collect as many collectibles as possible on the first go) but I do think that for those willing to sink a little deeper, it's a really fruitful and one-of-a-kind experience. Glad you enjoyed the review!
@appreciations: Thank you so much! I totally get that Snake Pass is not everyone's thing, as it can be pretty hard to pick up casually (especially if they follow the tradition of trying to collect as many collectibles as possible on the first go) but I do think that for those willing to sink a little deeper, it's a really fruitful and one-of-a-kind experience. Glad you enjoyed the review!
I'm so happy to know more people turned back around on Snake Pass, with each passing day it really does grow closer to being my 2017 GOTY
Yeah, it's crazy to me how well Snake Pass has aged. Even in a year as stacked as 2017, it just keeps getting better and better. I won't deny that I used to treat this as a bit of a meme, and then a bit of a guilty pleasure, until I finally came fully around on it last year. I'm just glad that it's finally getting the recognition it deserves; we might never see a sequel, but I'd die to see more games in this kind of vein created.
Pkshyguy
1 year ago