Despite my strong aversion to the slithering species Snake Pass is quite the charming platformer thanks to its wonderful design aesthetics and challenging game design that hearkens back to the roots of platform gaming. In this colorful world you’ll play Noodle the snake who, along with his hummingbird companion, Doodle, must collect missing Keystones to reactivate portals and restore the land of Haven Tor.
Snake Pass tosses you right into the story and the gameplay with brief tutorial pop-ups that only hint at what is a fairly elaborate skill-based physics engine and control scheme. There are no unlockable abilities; no evolving skill tree; everything you need to perfectly complete all 15 levels in Snake Pass you have when the game begins. The only thing that will evolve is your own personal mastery of the controls and thus Noodles ability to successfully find and collect the games secrets.
Speaking of secrets, each level has five coins, some hidden, some obvious but in hard-to-reach places, and some just lying on the ground waiting to be collected. Even the most observant gamer can reach the end of a level with only two or three coins. You’ll often need to rotate the map (right stick) to look for hidden coins off the edges or even below the normal level architecture. Some of these coins represent some of the most challenging moments in my platform gaming career.
Platform games rely on consistent controls and Snake Pass offers up one of the more original designs. The RT acts as a throttle moving Noodle forward at a relatively slow speed. If you want to go faster, you’ll need to make him slither by alternating the left stick, all the while moving in your desired direction. If you need to slither up steps or rocks or spiral up some bamboo you can raise your head with the A button. LT will tighten your coils, allowing you to establish an anchor point to slowly navigate jungle-gym constructs of bamboo to reach areas off the beaten path, where most hidden coins are stashed. The only other command is the Y button which summons Doodle to lift up your tail, which may or may not be helpful depending on the situation.
In the earlier levels of the game these advanced coil-tighten-extend tactics are used to collect hidden coins, but later in the game you’ll need to master this ability just to reach the end of the more challenging level designs, not to mention collecting the missing Keystones that become increasingly more difficult to reach. Coins are optional, but those Keystones are critical to moving on to the next level. You’ll also need to collect numerous bubbles scattered about the level that act more like Pac-Man dots showing where you need to go and end up helping you thoroughly explore each stage.
Again, the presentation of Snake Pass is the main selling point despite having a hero that many fear, especially when you share a color scheme remarkably close to the deadly coral snake. Thankfully, Noodle look more like Kaa from The Jungle Book, complete with goofy facial expressions and hilarious non-verbal sound effects. On the PC the game excels in detail with sharp textures in both the lush environments and bump-mapped scales on Noodle. There are rich vibrant colors and fantastic particle effects and transparency on bubbles and water, even when you dive deep to the bottom of pools.
You can’t talk about the presentation without talking about the music. From the opening title screen to the last level, you are constantly treated to some of the best platforming tunes of recent memory. I was instantly taken back to platforming favorites like Crash Bandicoot and Banjo-Kazooie with a dash of Secret of Monkey Island – not a platformer but it definitely shared that same island style flavor of wooden flutes and tiki drums creating this uplifting backdrop to a game that is often about brutal trial and error when it comes to gathering some of the more obscure collectibles.
Admittedly, the game is only 15 levels, and for those who don’t care about getting 100% you can probably finish this in 4-6 hours, but for those who want every last coin, expect to spend upwards of 15+ hours to get that perfect score. Thankfully, the game allows you to return to previous levels and collect anything you missed. And at only $20, even if you do play for five hours and never touch it again, you’re sure to get your money’s worth in pure enjoyment.
For as frustrating as some of the coin collects were I was surprised just how relaxing Snake Pass ended up being. There are no timers, and you meander about at a relatively slow pace just exploring, collecting, and appreciating all the wonderful detail that went into creating this charming game. My only minor complaint was the manual camera that had me constantly tweaking the right stick to get just the right angle on the action; especially since Noodle’s movement is relational to the camera. It also would have been nice to be able to skip the cutscenes when replaying levels that have them. For you screenshot junkies out there, Snake Pass is one of the few games to support Ansel; NVIDIA’s new tech to allow screen captures from any angle.
Snake Pass is one of the biggest surprises of the year so far; mostly because I had never heard of it and wasn’t expecting it, but also because it is one of those rare games that encompasses all the charm and style of those 90’s platformers and puts a next-gen polish on the presentation and an original spin on gameplay and controls. This is the perfect example of a game that is easy to play and difficult to master, where the progressive difficulty arc lies solely on the player’s mastery of the controls. And no matter how frustrating it gets, there is something about the world of Haven Tor that will keep you coming back until Noodle and Doodle have saved the day and gathered every last collectible.
