PEGBRJE: Snake Blocks and The Deer God
Hello 55
Snake Blocks is a 3D puzzle game created by Spooky Cat, an indie studio based in the USA. Players are given the simple task of getting each snake to its respective coloured cube. How many snakes, one might ask? Well…
Similarly to a few games seen in the bundle before, players will be dragging the heads of the ‘snake’ to the desired location while making the ‘body’ as the trail left behind. The number of body segments is limited based on the colour seen at the top left, which means that players cannot just make the longest snake ever and assume they’ll get ‘more points’ or something. Instead this is a game of resource management, finding a path that uses fewer than the required segments so that everyone is happy and moving to the next level.
Now obviously, just one snake is easy enough — which is why there are no levels of just one snake outside of the tutorial. Instead, the starting snake count is 2, and each colour can have their own segment count. Instead of just trying to find the shortest path, players need to look for which snake needs to take the shortest path, and plan around that snake to get the second one to its home as well. This continues to be exasperated by adding more and more snakes — up to five by my understanding — which can add a lot of confusion when things get covered.
As stated above, this is not necessarily a new game mechanically but Snake Blocks does give a few new flavours. Being able to control everything by dragging is nice for those that have a hard time moving with arrows in a 3D space, even if it does cause some hilarious movements by accident. There’s also a level editor if you like to explore making your own ways of confusing the snakes. If both of these things sound like what you want in a puzzle game, then go ahead and give this a try.
Do note that it does not install properly through the itch.io app. Download it from the page and it works fine.
The Deer God is a narrative sidescroller created by Crescent Moon Games, an indie studio in the USA. After a series of events causes a hunter to accidentally shoot a fawn, their soul is dragged in to the natural world in which they must live their life as a deer to understand what they have done.
Starting as a fawn themselves, players must navigate to the east to explore, learning different abilites as they go in order to avoid the perils of nature while growing up. Players can run and jump (learn double jump almost instantly), as well as dash to the side in order to headbutt any creature that got in the way. I do mean any creature, the deer can headbutt passive creatures which gives a ‘red’ aura to indicate that this was a bad idea. Once players have eaten enough of the local flora, they can grow to a teen deer and continue on their way, interacting with different animals and humans to find out what they must do.
This aging mechanic is important as the core of the platforming puzzles revolve around the abilities gained and how ‘old’ the player is at that time. The fawn is small and can fit in to tiny places, but cannot jump as far as the adolescent deer. Now one might think ‘hang on, aging only goes in one direction’ — that is true, but The Deer God handles this by having death reincarnate the player back to their fawn state. Think of it similarly to Super Mario; he does not get to remain large when he falls in to a bottomless pit, he comes back as a small guy. This is an oversimplification, but the core point is that death is not necessarily the end for the player, nor is it a good thing due to how much progress may be lost. It’s best to take on each challenge with as much ‘experience’ as possible, which means dying as little as possible.
The Deer God does an interesting job of blending in its story with its gameplay, specifically staying at an arms length while giving some tidbits and characters to nudge you forward. There are times when you can go ‘days’ without any information, only that you need to keep going forward to find out what may come next. The art work is the biggest highlight for me, and is easy to get lost in simply by just looking at the backdrops. If you love beautiful pixel art and ‘calming-yet-stressful’ games, this might be for you.
Do be aware that this is the demo version of the game, and not the full game. Two versions are given with 0.1 and 0.2, but only 0.1 was downloadable through the itch.io client. I played both to see major differences, and from my understanding the 0.2 is the better version in terms of pacing and experience.
The full game is available on steam if you are interested in checking it out.
