Gold and temples go together like peanut butter and chocolate. It’s certainly possible to have one without the other but the two are best combined, which makes those light-fingered raiders all the more troublesome. This calls for a security system, and very little is more secure than a giant hungry snake. It also doesn’t hurt if each tasty gold-stealing goon makes the snake grow just a little bit larger, which on the one hand means it’s a bit easier to get in its own way but also enables solving bigger and more intricate puzzles.
Temple of Snek is an adventure based on the old game of Snake, where eating anything makes you grow one tile bigger. In the original this also made the snake faster, which eventually meant its lightning-fast slither sent it rocketing into the wall or its own body, but fortunately the beat of the soundtrack’s temple drums are nice and steady, giving you time to think about and solve the environmental and switch-based puzzles of each new room. The Temple of Snek demo starts off with a tiny little reptile only a few tiles long, barely able to hold down two buttons at once, but a little light snacking quickly adds to its length and leads to more complicated puzzles. Square buttons are triggers, with their effects staying active once pressed, while circles need continuous weight applied. This can be a problem when the button drops spikes into the floor, and it may take a few attempts to figure out how to hold the switch down, eat a goon, and make it to the button on the other side of the spikes before your tail passes over the first one. Powerful as the snake is, it’s not too fond of being perforated.
Other mechanics also can result in an untimely snake-death if not used properly. So long as one side of the snake it still on land you can slither over gaps, which is helpful when a switch is on a ledge but a potential issue if the other side of a gap is past a body of water and the snake isn’t quite long enough to reach. On top of that the raider-goons aren’t too fond of temple guardians and will attack if they’re not chomped on first, but no matter how you might die it only takes a single hit to end up back at the start of a room. Thankfully checkpoints are common so there’s not a lot of backtracking, and then the demo ends just as the puzzles are getting nicely tricky.
The Temple of Snek demo has been released as part of the Autumn Steam Games Festival, and it’s a clever little thing that manages to be both violent and cute at the same time. There’s an old trailer below to get a sense of the game, but for best results head on over to its Steam page and give the game a play.
