Serpentes: 10th Anniversary Edition adds some wild randomness to the ‘Snake” concept, creating something enormously hard to stop playing.
Just to save you some time, you should just go buy anything made by PUNKCAKE Délicieux. It’s all gold. But I can spend some more time convincing you if you need it. This game, which builds upon a title made by Benjamin Soulé, one of the members of PUNKCAKE, which in itself built upon the old game Snake. If you don’t know it, you slither around a limited arena picking up little things that make your snake grow longer. The longer you get, the harder it is to dodge the walls and the coils of your own body. Simple and terribly compelling. Soulé built on that for Serpente, and for its tenth anniversary, they’ve built something even more difficult to put down.
In this game, you slither around the arena picking up fruit. Each fruit offers different bonuses when you pick them up. The first time you grab the fruit it gives you points, the second can add or remove sections of your snake, the third brings different enemies into play, and the fourth and fifth rows start making dramatic changes to how you can play (including putting you through entire minigames). The thing is, these bonuses are randomized, so while you can guess what manner the fruit will affect the game, you won’t know specifics. Also, you only have a minute to play (unless you can pick up some time bonuses to keep you going), so decide what to grab quickly.
This all sounded really straightforward when I read it on the itch.io page, but Serpente plays out so quickly over its minute playtime that it just feels like thrilling chaos. You’re constantly trying to figure out what you’ve even done while you can’t ignore the compulsion to just pick up more fruit as fast as you can, all while under a tight time limit. It’s just so dang fun and you really need to play it.
Serpentes: 10th Anniversary Edition is available now on itch.io.
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