The conversation around what people call "game of the year" is almost always dominated by the AAA industry. This is in part due to Geoff Keighley and his advertisement stream disguised as an awards show, but also just because of the nature of big budget gaming. When we think "game of the year" we are conditioned to think something BIG. The breathtaking world of Tears of the Kingdom, the expansive dialogue of Baldur's Gate 3, the staggeringly massive machines of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon.

I'm sure these games are great, I've only played one myself, but to me the metric of what makes a truly excellent game comes from how it makes me feel and how well it executes on its concepts and delivers the experience it wants me to have, emotionally, mechanically, or both. Maybe its obvious, but I still find it to be worth saying.

Snake Farm is a top-down action roguelike developed by Heather Flowers, creator of the wonderful Extreme Meatpunks Forever series, released in September of 2023. It takes about 15 minutes to play. It is my favorite game of the year.

Where Snake Farm excels over everything else I played is not in presentation nor in storytelling, but in sheer perfection of gameplay. As previously mentioned, it is a roguelike, but specifically sits in what I refer to as the power escalation subgenre defined by games like Vampire Survivors, that hinges on the player getting a constant stream of upgrades that increase their ability to fight enemies to an absurd degree.

However, while Vampire Survivors uses this concept to create a sort of idle combat experience, Snake Farm gives the player far more agency in how the game escalates. The trick of the game is that you don't just buy more upgrades between rounds, you also buy more snakes.

Oil is life, life is money, money is death. Snake Farm is a game of greed. You enter a battle arena of your own making. Every death is entirely the consequence of your choices. No deaths are unfair, your grave was of your own making. You didn't have to buy that tiger snake, and yet you saw the potential reward and you did. The question, then, is why buy snakes at all? Can't you just never get any snakes, and complete the game with absolutely no challenge? Or, if you still want to actually have a game to play, buy the bare minimum amount and never take any risks? Well... yeah, technically, but that implies that your goal is to survive. Your goal was never to survive. The game makes it clear on every death, and on every finished run, you are expendable. You don't matter. Your only legacy will be a high score.

Yes, you can play it safe with your snake purchases, but less snakes means less oil and teeth to harvest, and when your 10 days are up and you see your score at the end you will know you could have done better. Could have pushed it further. This is where a 15 minute game reaches infinity. Oil is life. Life is money. Money is death. The score, those leaderboards, they will always drive you just a bit further, make you take more risks to become the best snake farmer.

Also, the game is just super fucking fun. I've been bullshitting the whole time, all this stuff about high scores is true and all but its not why I keep coming back to Snake Farm. I just think it's a total blast to play.

I am of the philosophy that any combat-focused game is only as good as its enemies, and the snakes are some of the most unique and engaging I have ever had the pleasure of fighting. On a base level, their shape and movement mean that if you're not careful, they'll be able to coil around you and trap you, leaving you vulnerable to attack if you don't break out quickly. In my first couple hours of playing I assumed that the snakes dealt contact damage on top of other attacks, but this is not the case! Contact damage is something that I have never been a fan of in games, and I appreciate that it it not relied on here, because it leads into the other aspect of the snakes that I love, which is just how varied they are in their attempts to murder you.

Every snake is unique in its moveset, and every snake carries its own risks and rewards. The slug snake moves slow and shoots projectiles, making it easy to deal with on its own but able to turn the game into a bullet hell if enough are in play at once. The electric looper can only deal damage to you if you're right up against it, but its twisty looping movement patterns can easily ensnare you if you get too close. the rat snake pursues the player directly and goes in for a biting attack when close that I have a really hard time avoiding. this is just the tip of the iceberg. there are so many different snakes and so many weird and unique ones, like the lootsnake that has absurd health but drops tons of oil, or the clown snake (one of my favorites) that cannot attack but leaves little colored balls in its path that act as obstacles. the names and themes are absolutely delightful, there's the tsuchinoko, the snakebug, the tombsnake (also a favorite), the snake snake, and that's not even mentioning the massive boss snakes you can buy on the final day.

Combine these enemies with an equally brilliant selection of 5 unique farm-themed weapons, each one creating a unique style of play and every single one being really fun to use, and then throw in a bunch of different upgrades that increase your snake farming power even further, and you end up with an unbelievably tight gameplay loop of arcade horde combat that is just such a delight to play. All of this content is also split between four packs, which allows for more refined different experiences and for the player to not get overwhelmed by everything. there's the base pack, the game as it was originally released, the curse pack, with a spooky theme and more unique abilities to combine risk and reward, and the worm pack, which adds worms. worm pack is the best one. Oh, and there's the absurdly broken chaos pack, which just combines everything into an absolute mess that lets you combine items that were never meant to be combined in hilarious ways.

In a weird way, the weapons and enemies of Snake Farm make it feel like a game I would have conceptualized when I was 10. There are only two real design requirements for each, that the weapons have to be farming tools of some kind and that the snakes... just kind of have to be snakes. There is near-infinite possibility within this, and it reminds me of the sort of games I would try to make in Scratch when I was younger, where I would mostly just make a bunch of different concepts and art for variations of things to add to it and I would put way less work into the actual gameplay, because again, I was like 10. Snake Farm feels like if you gave those ideas to someone with quite a lot more skill in game development, and I love it a little extra for that.

One last thing I'd like to mention before closing this out is the story of Snake Farm, because... well, there isn't one. Except for when there sort of is. The most explicit we get is in the game's description on steam, which bluntly states "IT IS THE YEAR FIFTY THOUSAND AND YOU ARE A SNAKE FARMER WITH TEN DAYS TO LIVE." Everything else that points to any sort of backstory is a little weirder. The title on the main menu has splash text below it that randomizes between various phrases, and one of them is the unbelievably ominous statement that "THE SKY USED TO BE BLUE." The shopkeeper, a masked figure named Goose, describes one of the boss snakes, the cobalt snake, as "THE SNAKE THAT KILLED THE WORLD." Goose also seems to just... hate you.

It is clear that something terrible has happened in this world, that things are very deeply wrong.

Not my problem though! Too busy FARMING THOSE SNAKES!

Snake farm is $3 on steam, by the way. You could buy Snake Farm for yourself and 19 other friends for the price of your average AAA release. You should do that. Oil is life. Spread the farm. Life is money. Go on. Money is death. Do it.

Sorry, I'm not sure what came over me. Where were we? Snake Farm is a fantastic little bite-sized roguelike that I highly recommend to anyone looking for a fun, quick, replayable experience that offers a ton of different possibilities for gameplay styles and builds. It is weird and charming and I adore it. Also, this is probably one of the only reviews I'll ever do that the developer actually might see. If you are reading this, "Heather Flowers," if you do even exist... Hi! Good game!

Clearly, you did not have snake oil.