SnekromancY: the Snake from your old Nokia, raised from the dead

I lost my best run over one bite too many. My snake had grown huge, a dozen undead clinging to its tail and blasting in every direction, and there was one last scrap of food left to grab in a corner of the room. I went for it, cut the turn too tight, bit my own tail. Death screen. That is SnekromancY in a single move: a game that punishes you for being too greedy, in the most literal sense.

The pitch fits on a napkin: the Snake from your old phone, the Nokia 3310 one, crossed with a bullet heaven and a pinch of necromancy. It is made by SlightlyMadman, published by Final Screw, out on PC via Steam, with a demo if you want to feel it out before paying. On paper it smells like a game jam joke. In hand, it bites a lot harder than expected.

Two mechanics, and definitely not just one

There is one thing you need to grasp so you do not get it wrong, because the game barely explains it. You grow by eating. That is the Snake of old: every bite lengthens your tail, and if you stop eating, your body decays on its own, shrinks, and you eventually starve to death. So you have to keep feeding, constantly, to stay alive.

Summoning undead is a separate thing. Zombies, skeletons, ghosts: they climb onto your back and shoot in your place, auto-aimed or manually aimed if you have the skills for it. That is your artillery, not your food. You do not grow by recruiting a minion, you grow by eating. The two systems live side by side but never merge, and it is precisely their friction that makes this thing interesting.

The fear of your own tail

Because eating, here, is never harmless. The original Snake already punished greed: the fatter you got, the more the board closed in on you. SnekromancY takes that old trap and sets it off in the middle of chaos. You must eat so you do not wither, but every bite lengthens an already unwieldy snake, one you steer pixel by pixel between the bullets, in dungeons where biting your own tail is still a death sentence. Caught between two fears: drop the food and fade out, or keep going and end up strangled by your own length. It is silly, it is tense, and it belongs to this game alone.

On top of that sits the roguelite layer. You build your horde around each undead's attacks, collect gems to upgrade your powers, dig up relics that allow increasingly deranged builds. Nothing revolutionary in principle, but the escalation works: after a few runs my artillery-snake was spitting so many projectiles that I could barely see the enemies underneath. Grotesque, gleeful, exactly what you ask of the genre.

What it is actually worth

Not everything shines. The game bets everything on one idea, and that idea shows its edges once you have gone through the main builds: the depth is there, but it has a bottom. And readability derails in the big spikes, when the screen fills with both enemy fire and a snake gone endless. Some deaths felt more unfair than earned, drowned in a visual mess where I could no longer tell the dangerous projectile from the rest. A couple of clarity options would not hurt.

None of that stopped me from coming back. SnekromancY plays in short sessions, for the immediate thrill of an absurd build thrown together in ten minutes, more than for dozens of hours of meta-progression. It is a small game that knows exactly what it is, that executes its ludicrous idea with enough bite to earn forgiveness for its limits. If the genre wears you out with its clones, this resurrected snake at least offers a trap you will not find anywhere else: its own tail.

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