[PAX East] Snake Pass hands on: Ssssomething sssspecial

It’s hard to make a platforming adventure without a jump button, but Sumo Digital have done just that with Snake Pass. In Snake Pass, players control a snake named Noodle and his humming bird buddy Doodle as they attempt to rid their homeland of a villainous intruder.

Instead of running and jumping or having magical powers to solve their problems, the duo are restricted to the sorts of movements that a snake like Noodle might be able to perform. Noodle’s “abilities,” if you want to call them that, set the stage for both traversal and the world in which you traverse in. Even moving forward isn’t as simple as it sounds, showing how the complexities of acting like a snake are more difficult than you might think. Noodle’s designer Seb Liese stressed to me to not think about other adventure games and the way those characters move, but to think about how a snake uses its entire body as a group of muscles that can straighten out or tighten at will. When thinking along those lines players can utilize some pretty cool tricks to solve problems presented to them.

Maybe you will have to coil yourself up right before a gap so you can push off the ground with enough force to clear it. A set of poles might be just out of reach of each other but if you tighten yourself around one you might be able to swing around it and launch yourself to the other. It truly feels like a fresh way to play a pretty familiar concept for a game.

Levels themselves all feature the same objectives. Find the three jewels to unlock the opening to the next level. There are other, more well hidden coins and wisps to collect which test a player’s ability to move around the environment, but they are not required to progress. This may allow players to quickly get through the game’s 15 levels, but Sumo Digital plans to embrace the speed running community with a number of different leaderboards to track time and completion.

Interested players won’t have to wait long, as Snake Pass will be slithering its way onto the digital storefronts of the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Playstation 4, and Steam on March 28th.