Serpentes

Serpentes (2015) is a traversal game where you control a snake and collect game-altering fruits to boost your score in super short rounds. Play involves traversing the grid without hitting your tail, but the real challenge is choosing which fruits to eat to extend your score, without adding too many hazards or confusing controls. It stands out for its unusual twist on classic Snake mechanics, turning what to eat (and when to eat it) into a critical part of exploiting the fruit-induced changes to the challenge.

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Play is like the classic game Snake: you move around a grid and eat bits of fruit to increase your score, while avoiding your own body. The twist is that you only have 60 seconds to get the highest score you can while choosing which rule-changing fruits to eat. The first time you eat a specific fruit, it affects your score; the second time changes your length, the third time adds hazards, and so on. How exactly, though, is randomised on each run.

As you progress and the chaos increases, you need to carefully consider which fruit to eat. You can try and go for just one type of fruit to unlock all of its powers, or you can try and get an equal amount of everything to extend the time you have. When you die or run out of time, you start again, and each fruit's powers are randomised. By increasing your score, you unlock permanent boosts, like having an extra fruit appear on the screen, giving you a better chance at getting a high score.

The result is a game that seems simple at first, but quickly reveals a much greater level of complexity and depth as you make rapid-fire decisions about which fruit to eat. The short rounds and simplicity of the core premise keep things engaging and make going for a high score surprisingly fun.

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Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Serpentes (Punkcake) 5 weeks ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 weeks ago.