As you can read on the Snake Pass product page on Steam, Seb Liese designed the prototype of the game as a love letter not only to the games of his childhood but to his pet, a snake. This fact would remain in the anecdotal if not for the particularity of the proposal we have
in hand, a title that is so far from the standards of the current video game that it can only exist as a way to get rid of the ghosts of the past. Our protagonist, Noodles, is cheerful and colorful, and is accompanied by a hummingbird that acts as an assistant.
Everything is jovial and relaxed, and although in that prototype that received awards here and there and inspired Sumo Digital to take Snake
Pass forward, the creature was much more realistic and less cartoony, an intentionality is seen by giving it these particular features and over everything, in how the game is executed from the own mechanics.
But who is Sumo Digital and what does it look like in all this? For those who do not hear your name, we are facing a company responsible for
quality games as high as LittleBigPlanet 3, the two deliveries of Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Forza Horizon 2 and other deliveries of the
franchise, besides being collaborating at this time in the expected Crackdown 3. And Snake Pass is a license of its own, which has just arrived not only to PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 but also to the newborn Nintendo Switch. The latter is relevant not only
because the game format is suitable for laptop but because it has been the first test of fire of the system when handling the Unreal Engine 4
in its circuits … and if you have doubts: it is perfect, both in portable mode as in dock, without a single loss in the color palette, frame stability or performance in general. Test passed.
Clarified this, we can start talking about a game that is quite atypical and perhaps because of its rarity is going to divide the public
enough, in the same way that in part it will have to reach curious users who crave games like from before with regard to his aesthetic bet, very close to that of classic plataformeros such as Banjo-Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot or Chameleon Twist.
The extreme care with which the protagonists have been designed combines the simplicity of the past with a good job in animations, which in the case of
Noodles (the snake) is decisive as it is the axis of the whole proposal. Unfortunately, its artistic design is not up to par with its own levels, repeating textures and buildings over and over again, but it makes up for it with other added values.
In Snake Pass, the objective is to control a snake to collect a series of crystals that have been lost in a closed area and that we have to carry to some altars.
All this during fifteen phases, collected in four worlds in ascending difficulty (and with a fairly pronounced peak, by the way) and where the care Sumo
Digital has applied to make the player difficult. In addition to these elements, which are mandatory to complete the level, there are other collectibles such as blue bubbles and five coins, strategically placed in areas of difficult access and that will cost us some headaches.
This design based on trollingIt works more than well, creativity is not one of the shortcomings of Snake Pass and even more, it could be said that it is key for the game to truly transcend and not remain in the anecdote, because getting 100% of the title can last a lot
hours of play. And that’s not to mention the time trial mode that is unlocked in each world to be completed, although that at the time of publication
of this analysis this option is not available in the Nintendo Switch version (Sumo already works in a patch to add it). If they will be ten , twenty or two hundred
hours depends on the skill of the user, because this is where the Snake Pass particularity comes in: the snake crawls, and that is its only function, so to get coins or crystals in high areas will have to go coiling bamboo canes and other structures with a control that allows us to move your entire body in 360º. So if for example we want to reach the top of a temple, we will have to approach,
turn on the bamboo, hold on with our heads to make an impulse and keep going up little by little so as not to fall. It may sound very simple, maybe even too much: it is
not. Snake Pass may seem like an easy game, and that is the trap, because it is difficult and its control has the key to all this in one hundred percent. We move with one trigger, we grab another and raise the head with a button
