Too Long; Didn't Play: Snakebird

This week continues Danopian December, in which I will review only games that were gifted to me by that fowl punster of fowl punsters: Danopian The Manopian.

Next up: Snakebird

Time snaked: 59 Minutes

Sponsored By: Danopian

Garter Finch Review

Never have I spent so much time on YouTube while playing a game.

Boa Cormorant Review

Greg Decker here, but you can call me Steve. Today we’re going to explore the wilderness of Pripyat in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the elusive Columbidae Serpentes, commonly known as the bird snake. Or Snakebird, depending on whether you ask an ornithologist or a herpetologist.

Columbidae Serpentes is a fascinating creature. It lives in the trees around Chernobyl, but it can’t fly and has no wings. Instead it slithers along like a snake. They use their long, feathery bodies to bridge wide gaps in the trees, avoiding the poisonous thorns that grow in this area as they search for fruit to eat.

They have no natural predators, partly because they're the biggest animal living in the region, and partly because they taste terrible. You might be wondering if overpopulation is a problem, but don't you worry. Nature always finds the balance, and the way the Columbidae Serpentes found balance is to be the dumbest, most fragile creature ever to slither along a tree trunk. The most common cause of death is falling out of their own tree, and the second most common is to starve to death after wriggling into a position they can't get out of.

There are some other biological quirks that make the Pripyat Snakebird unique in the animal kingdom. Its stomach can only expand in one direction. That means that, unlike other snakes, when it swallows a meal, it doesn't bulge out like a sock full of croquet balls, but instead stretches out like a sock full of croquet mallets. Every apple, orange or mango that is swallowed is then compressed and extruded through the Snakebird’s digestive tract, resulting in a permanent boost to its length. It's another one of those evolutionary balance things, because it means that by the time it's long enough to reach the really good fruit, it's already full.

We're going to completely ignore the fact that apples, oranges and mangos grow in the same tree in this part of the world, because this part of the world gave us the Snakebird in the first place, and after that oddity, a tree that bears three kinds of common fruit is pretty weak sauce.

The smart ones find a way to stay up high with the newer fruit until they're hungry again, but as I said earlier, there aren't many smart ones. You can always tell when the trees are fruiting in Pripyat, because you'll hear the floppy thunk of feathery tubes falling from a great height.

Crikey! Look at that, would you! There's two of the little fellows now. You see how the blue one is shorter than the green one? That means the green one will probably help the blue one climb up to the next branch for that apple up there. Yes! See how one is standing on the other’s head so it can…

[Thunk]

[Flop]

Oh, well. That's nature’s way, that is.

Will I snake on?

I think not, on this one. There's a lot to recommend Snakebird: the visuals, the sound design, etc., but the difficulty curve isn't among them. After the first ten levels, it was YouTube or bust. I don't mind a challenging puzzle, but there’s something about the puzzle design that I just don’t grok. There’s usually only one way to solve a given puzzle without dying or getting stuck, and so I spent a sizeable percentage of my playtime watching other people solve the levels. I’m willing to give myself two or three free peeks at a FAQ for any puzzle game I play, just because it helps me learn what the developers expect from me, but if I hit five, six, or ten levels in a row where the only way out is to consult YouTube, then I start to wonder if I’m the one with the problem here.

Is it the Devil Daggers of mobile puzzle ports?

It's hard, no question. But it's not the kind of hard you want to keep failing at. It's more of the kind of hard that makes you want to go do something else – something less frustrating, like alligator wrestling, or building your own PC from silicon you doped yourself in your mother’s oven.

Comments

Snakebird can go eat an entire bag of bag of Richards.

I had almost the exact same experience. The first three levels were fun. Level 5 was impenetrable, and when I looked up the solution to Level 6, I laughed so hard at the designer that they thought that it was actually feasible that a human person would be able to come up with that correct sequence of 58 random-seeming moves without wanting to stab their eyes out and bite their own fingers off so that they would never, ever be able to consider playing that bloody game ever again.

I made it a little farther than you gentlemen, probably because I have the kind of brain that enjoys being beaten violently against walls and I'm just plain stubborn, but reached the same point you did.

It stayed on my "side efforts" list for months before I admitted to myself that the idea of rearranging those birdsnakes in 100 different ways was never going to sound like a good time.

As I said to Greg a week ago, I think it would've been improved by having multiple solutions for each puzzle rather than requiring one very specific, hard to grasp arrangement - but then I don't know if it would still be what it is. I'm glad I tried it, though, it's a unique puzzle concept.

danopian wrote:

As I said to Greg a week ago, I think it would've been improved by having multiple solutions for each puzzle rather than requiring one very specific, hard to grasp arrangement - but then I don't know if it would still be what it is. I'm glad I tried it, though, it's a unique puzzle concept.

Sure, a unique puzzle concept, but also a prime example of the fact that most puzzles a person could come up with are simply not interesting to solve.

This one felt like it required brute-force trial-and-error on a scale that far outstrips the average person's memory. Like a game in which one player rolls a dice 300 times, and the other person has to guess the sequence of numbers they got, and is forced to start over every time they make a mistake.

All that griping done, it's quite possible that I simply didn't stick with it long enough for my brain to grok the underlying math and start to see "through" the puzzle, instead of flinging snakebirghetti at the wall.

P.S. Greg - I've stuffed the CD drive of my laptop with some dank bud, and it's been in the oven at 425 for 2 hours now. You're right, this is waaaay more fun.

Jonman wrote:

Sure, a unique puzzle concept, but also a prime example of the fact that most puzzles a person could come up with are simply not interesting to solve.

This one felt like it required brute-force trial-and-error on a scale that far outstrips the average person's memory. Like a game in which one player rolls a dice 300 times, and the other person has to guess the sequence of numbers they got, and is forced to start over every time they make a mistake.

Yeah, that's a fair point. That's how I feel about sliding block puzzles (c.f. anything negative I've ever said about Professor Layton), especially the ones that require a highly specific sequence of moves. You end up moving everything around a thousand times, but unless you're keeping very close track you're usually repeating the same moves over and over.