Snakebird

Snakebird is a grid-based puzzle game about manipulating strange, charming creatures that are half-snake and half-bird. Inside the levels, you control the snakebirds towards fruits which make them grow longer, carefully bending their bodies into specific shapes to contend with multiple hazards and obstacles. Don’t be fooled by the game’s cute, colorful aesthetic: Snakebird is very tough, but it’s also ultimately very rewarding.

Snakebird takes inspiration from the classic Snake genre, which has featured blocky reptiles eating fruits and growing ever longer since the 1980s. This core mechanical identity is maintained in Snakebird, but with a number of puzzly twists. First, in order to clear a level, you’ll need to eat all the fruit on the screen; this activates an exit portal every snake must escape through. Next, the game includes gravity, such that a snakebird is able to hang by a single segment from a cliff, but the second none of its body is grounded anymore, it will fall. (Unfortunately, snakebirds cannot fly.) And last, while the classic Snake games are real-time tests of your ability to react to danger, Snakebird is turn-based instead, giving you all the time you want to contemplate your next move.

While many thinky games have puzzles designed around a single “eureka” moment of realization, the levels from Snakebird usually don’t call for this type of epiphany. They’re rather solved after a series of smaller, clever realizations about the myriad ways of manipulating the snakebirds. In this sense, solving the game’s puzzles is more akin to untangling a knot than answering a riddle. They are chipped away at, slowly, until they finally come undone.

Though the world of Snakebird is bright and colorful, filled with juicy fruits and cartoonish creatures, the puzzles are generally very difficult, requiring multiple steps to complete. More than once, you’ll be falling into treacherous spikes, or soft-locking yourself around tortuous platforms. To mitigate this overall difficulty, the levels can be played somewhat out of order, meaning that you can make progress even if you’ve been stuck on one level. Note that the game also caters for players seeking even harder challenges, with a few bonus levels scattered across the map. The overall difficulty and the total lack of story make the game a better fit for players already familiar with puzzle games.

For those who love the charm of Snakebird but would prefer more approachable puzzles, the studio also released Snakebird Primer, a collection of puzzles with the same mechanics as Snakebird, but which are much easier to finish. Both Snakebird Primer and classic Snakebird are packaged together in Snakebird Complete, which is available only on the Nintendo Switch.

This description was written by Asher Stone and edited by Oriane Tury.