The Occasional Bobbins : 1

The Occasional Bobbins is a brief and very very very occasional newsletter recommending a videogame that I’ve been playing and hope someone else might take a fancy to as well and I draw a picture of it too.

What is this? It’s called Snake-A-Roid

No, what is it? It’s a game where you fly a snake through different stages destroying asteroids and aliens whilst collecting power ups. Get hit and you lose a part of the snake. Lose all the snake and you‘re a gonner.

Where do I get it? I’ve been playing it on Steam but it’s also up on Itch if you’d prefer. It’s about a fiver at the time of writing.

Here’s the website. Go look with your face. Or whatever.

What does it look like?

That looks nice, how is it in motion?

You can watch the trailer here.

Ooh. Tell me more!

Well, first up, if you’re expecting a typical Snake variant where you collect munchies and grow your tail then try and avoid crashing into your own bumhole, this is not it! You start off with a fairly big blue snake (missus) and it’s more a matter of not losing yourself in the noise than avoiding yourself, each hit knocks a chunk off your snake. You will always be in a pickle.

Most of the time, you’re gonna be keeping an eye on where your snake is amidst the clutter (there is a lot of clutter), fighting off the stuff causing the clutter and after a few stages, battling some pretty nefarious alien spawns as well. Whilst never heading into especially complex territory, they’re tuned in such a way as to require some prompt action to get rid of before they become too troublesome. This is not a game where you want to leave spaceships lingering around for too long, they will make things more difficult and cause precisely six swears per spaceship.

When it comes to the bosses, you’re really going to need to watch yourself too. They’re nothing a bit of practice won’t help you get past but they’re nasty little multi-phase buggers with plenty of moving parts. Creative and interesting to fight, but far from easy. It took me a few goes to crack the first one, found the second one a lot easier to deal with but perhaps I was just used to what the game was up to by that point? Dunno. They’re a nice mix of having to dive right in to shoot them and try and manage some nifty dodging manoeuvres whilst you’re at it so far so no complaints here.

Haven’t delved too deeply into the other modes outside of the main mode but a brief go on the survival mode had me completely cussing up the game as every now and then it picked the pace up and left me feeling well and truly battered. Again, in the most complimentary way possible here. It’s arcade-evil rather than unfair-evil, you know? Brutal when it wants to be but the kind of brutal that has me grinning and swearing and swearing and grinning some more.

The Final Word?

Rectangle.