a game where you are a snake, in a jungleworld with a soundtrack by david wise, best known for making the tunes for donkey kongcountry. that had me sold, but snake pass by sumo digitaldidn’t just rest on their laurels of having david wise as its composer. starting off, how does one play as a snake?
where to buy snake away, no, you don’t sneak around in a box. noodle the vegetarian snake, no m rating here,moves forward around with the zr trigger button. slither from side to side to get a bit ofa speed boost. reach upwards by pressing a and use zl tocoil around objects tighter and even lock
yourself in place. this fairly simply button scheme ends up beingable to get a lot done in the game world setup chock full of large bamboo poles to wind around. some of these bamboo pole structures are friendly,others treacherous and a few of seem downright impossible at first. a big part of snake pass for me, was goingback to replay old levels and see if i could tackle challenges that i couldn’t handlebefore. i was able to zip through levels that beforei would be extremely cautious on. snake pass is pretty forgiving about physicsand it really does help to have momentum to
power through obstacles. this snake does have an ace up his, er, somewhere,for when you’re in trouble. you can call your hummingbird buddy to pickup your tail, which is helpful in situations to give that final little boost over a ledge. not necessary most of the time, and sometimeswon’t save you, but it is handy on occasion. there’s even a water world to put a newtwist on controls, filled with aquatic ambience from what was my favourite david wise trackin the game. …*pause for music*… yeah, there’s no mistaking who composedthat.
what snake pass manages to pull off is reallyincredible from a technical and gameplay perspective. i don’t know if unreal engine 4 is simplythat good or if some programmer is a genius at sumo digital but they made wrapping aroundobjects look easy. with a game like this, i’d expect the snaketo become some sort of garbled glitchy mess with tons of clipping errors, but nope, snakepass is solid. the closest game i could think of is nobynoby boy and looking back, that was far more floaty. snake pass is only floaty while noodle isfalling, to perhaps give the player more of a chance for recovery.
in addition, noodle can traverse on almostall of the world’s geometry with the exception of some trees and thin hanging branches. there aren’t any invisible walls and barriers,although that may benefit from the levels being composed of large floating islands. for the most part, if you see something, youcan work your way to it, or you can make it to certain points or collectibles in a waythat wasn’t necessarily intended. it was very, very rare that i got stuck onany geometry. this is the sort of freedom i loved in mario64 way back when, and what we have also seen in breath of the wild more recently.
i played snake pass with a pro controller,but i did try playing a few levels with joy-cons also. and well, i found using that middle-alignedright analog stick to move around the camera isn’t so comfortable. if you only have joy-cons and want to leavethat right analog stick alone, the camera does do decent job most of the time and youcan center it with the left trigger. however, lining up the camera in tough spotsdoes come in handy at avoid accidental falls. simply put: i would highly recommend gettinga pro controller. there are 15 levels, and i was thinking iwas in for a really short game based off how
quick the first two or three levels went. however, those levels are mainly there onlyto show you the ropes and do a really good job at teaching what you can do the rest ofthe game. later levels are pretty sizeable and generallyin a manageable three part structure for each keystone that you have to recover, especiallythanks to their beacons of light. and fortunately, doodle the hummingbird sidekickkeeps quiet from hand-holding at that point onwards. snake pass really encourages exploration andi found levels designed in a way that really communicated well about when to expect a hiddenitem nearby.
like when you just know a block is going tohave a mushroom in mario, snake pass manages to do similar things in a new series. clever tricks like having a gap in the middleof a slide, or a subtle bit of bamboo sticking over a ledge help hint at these. not all of the 5 gatekeeper coins or 20 blueorbs in each level are hinted at though, some you have spend time exploring or work yourway backwards through the level to see, and others are visible in plain sight but justplain tough to get. in snake pass, it’s one thing to go outon a ledge and get a collectible, it’s another thing coming back alive.
and what i came to realize is that it wasbest to practice “checkpoint management†to immediately hit a checkpoint after collectinga tough coin or orb to avoid having to do it again. this part wasn’t the best short-term butafter finishing a level, the game takes note of which orbs and coins you did get, so youdon’t have to collect them ever again. also in levels, it’s not just purely windingyour way through them; some levels have levers or spools to wind around as a trigger to startan event or rotate part of it to access new areas. it’s worth noting that while the game’sframe rate is mostly smooth, it did chug from
time to time when large distant areas werevisible. hopefully unreal engine 4 will continue tobe more optimized for nintendo switch in the future, and snake pass ended up looking prettydarn good after all. one of the weaker points of the game was thestory. while the game did give a reason to why the3 keystones in each level were out of place, i felt that i was getting half the game’sstory and lore through messages on the loading screen before each level. could the game have gone without a story? probably could, but it did hint an end encounterthat might encourage players to slither on.
on the plus side, any cutscenes were quickto get through and then it’s right back to gameplay. some of my main issues with snake pass werenot with the game itself but with presentation that normally i take for granted. i found out snake pass wasn’t auto savingmy game progress after finishing each level when one time my pro controller and all itsbuttons stopped detecting in-game but worked still on the switch via the home button. i had to restart the game and lost 8 levelsof progress. i’m guessing at some point there will bean update to fix this if it hasn’t already,
there wasn’t a save button in the menu soto get around this, i had to go back to the main game screen and from there it would auto-save. and here’s one that fooled me the firsttime, note how the buttons on the screen don’t reflect the layout of the switch controller. small issues aside, in the end i was impressedby how well snake pass played. overall, i’d say i “liked†snake pass’mostly relaxing gameplay experience that made me think of new ways to get around in a game. sure there were some tough parts for collectiblesthat were frustrating but the game’s system
allowed me to leave them and come back laterwhen i was better at the game.
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