You gotta play Serpentes
I mentioned this game yesterday so I figured I should finally write about it. I love Serpentes. I have always loved it. I bought it right after it came out - 9 years ago?? my god - and used to play it during lunch at my first games job. I was working for Tencent at the time. I kept it on my big fucking gamer laptop they assigned me and played it on business trips and shit. I remember trying to explain how good it was to a Tencent executive I often worked with directly, and I do recall him just smiling indulgently at me and asking, like, "what is itch.io." Good times.
You can still find the original version here, but there's now an "anniversary edition" on Steam as well, which I've also bought. The anniversary edition has an incredible soundtrack update, which alone makes the version worth it if you ever bought the original.
Serpentes is basically just Snake, but with a lot more chaos. I will allow the trailer to speak for itself:
You've got snake on the left - gridless snake, where you need to get your timing right to dodge obstacles, enemies, pick up fruits and other treats. Multiple fruits spawn each time, and you can choose between them. On the right side of the screen you've got a massive 5 by 10 grid of bonuses (and punishments). Each fruit you pick up will activate its row in the grid, triggering a new bonus plus all previous bonuses that fruit is connected to. So if you pick up a strawberry once, you might extend your snake by one... and if you pick it up a second time, you might extend the snake and then also spawn some candies that give you a small amount of additional points.
Each fruit is associated with a random set of bonuses, including a special super-powerful bonus you get if you collect it 5x. Some stage-5 bonuses require you to complete the tracks for two adjacent fruits at once. Some bonuses are actually punishments - you can poison your snake and kill it if you collect some fruits too many times. Other fruits delete snake segments, so if you collect that fruit at the wrong time, you can kill your snake by deleting it entirely. Other fruits will spawn enemies. Some fruits give you the ability to kill enemies, so you might have to balance enemy-spawning fruits with regular bites of your enemy-killing fruit.
And on top of that you've got a timer that will end your run. The only way to extend the timer is through bonuses, or through completing a column of the grid by collecting each of the ten fruits one time.
The mount of split-attention stuff you gotta do in this game is nuts. It's visually overwhelming. The audio is overwhelming. There are 40-50 different squares to keep track of at any given time, and each playthrough randomizes the bonuses and punishments, so every time you collect a fruit, you're discovering something new about the opportunities and dangers available to you. Nightmarish!!!
The Steam page describes it as "boomer" arcade gameplay, but I don't see it. This thing has a flavor similar to those extremely sly 2010s flash gag games. It's a pat-your-head-rub-your-tummy ass game. You can get better at it... but can you ever really get good at it? I break my own record every once in a while, but it's the kind of thing I can only play, rapid-fire, two or three times in a row, probably for less than 120 seconds, before getting sensory-overload punished into making a bunch of extremely dumb mistakes. I love it.
I keep it on my work computer now, too. Sometimes if I need to context-switch I can play this game for about 90 seconds and completely erase any thought in my head. Highly recommend this if you've got the kind of job where you'll often spend a moment or two in an empty meeting call, waiting for people to show up, and desperately needing to flush your entire brain down a toilet.
I need this, sometimes. The need is probably diagnosable. I do not care. I have Serpentes, so everything is fine.