Snake Pass Hands-On

We recently had the chance to get a hands-on experience with Sumo Digital's upcoming slithery simulator, getting to grips with the very interesting mechanic it revolves around.

To give a little bit of background about Snake Pass, it tasks the player with controlling a snake in a 3D physics-based puzzle-platformer, and it is certainly unlike anything you've played before. Controlling the snake is true to reality and on your journey you are accompanied by a hummingbird as your friend, guide and occasional assistant. Sumo Digital have used the physics of the game to create some extremely challenging gameplay that is compellingly unique.

To start with, forwards movement requires slithering, i.e. moving left to right as a snake would in order to push yourself forwards. The devotion to realistic snake movement isn't just limited to that, however, as it also applies to climbing. The player needs to coil themselves around things in order to establish a grip before moving up anything.

How this works in execution is initially very daunting and may put people off. In the first ten minutes with the controls it wouldn't be surprising if many people put it down and never touched it again. It seems jarring to begin with as you turn the snake left and right when moving forwards, and climbing is nothing short of a nightmare when you first attempt it, but the key with this game is perseverance and getting into the swing of things. Sure the later game levels are extremely hard, but the actual premise of the game and the basic concepts can be grasped when you wrap your head around it. There has clearly been a lot of effort put in to making this accessible, and Sumo Digital told us it had been tweaking and refining the movement for a while.

We played the first level which essentially served as a tutorial, giving you basic puzzles like moving up poles and climbing, but when the developer gave a demonstration of a later level, far more challenging puzzles were revealed, such as shifting walkways and switches you have to coil round to turn. The later levels, he told us, are also a lot more unforgiving if you fall off, with fewer checkpoints in between.

In terms of design, there is an emphasis on grassy surfaces, rocks and bamboo structures, all of which seem appropriate for a snake-themed game. What we saw pretty much followed this formula but Sumo Digital assured us more worlds are coming to the finished game and will offer not only more variety in terms of level design but also in appearance, as all the areas we saw looked extremely similar. What we did see was a polished cartoon world that looked amazing, though, and the attention to detail was equally stunning. The snake's face, for instance, changed depending on the situation i.e. looking worried when he was falling.

Not much of the narrative was given to us but there will certainly be a story running through all of the levels, Sumo Digital assured us. The demo on show was more about demonstrating the gameplay mechanic, one that is unique enough to warrant its own demo, especially since it can be so daunting to get to grips with.

Although the snake's movement gets easier over time, the control system could do with a bit of tweaking. The analogue stick can sometimes be hard to control and the perspective of the screen means you have to direct movement based on the camera's perspective, not the snake's. What this means is that when the snake is facing left but needs to turn to his right, you have to press forward on the analogue stick, which can be especially confusing during more advanced puzzles. Saying that, they have put a lot of thought into the controls, especially considering there are options to tighten the snake's grip or call for assistance from your hummingbird companion, who holds you in place when you may fall.

All in all the central mechanic in Snake Pass is enough to warrant our interest in it, and its execution, while not perfect, is good enough that it made for interesting playing and a rewarding learning experience. The developers have clearly put time into researching snakes to see how they move, and time will only tell how the other aspects of this game, like narrative and level design, work around this mechanic to bolster the experience.