Wormhole is an impeccable arcade revival of Snake that plays like it fell off the back of Derek Yu's van

GamesRoguelikeWormhole is an impeccable arcade revival of Snake that plays like it fell off the back of Derek Yu’s vanWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Pocket Moon Games)

Wormhole

PC gaming is incredibly adept at replicating the past, whether in the breakneck momentum of a boomer shooter, or the flickering polygons of a PS1 survival horror throwback. But one experience that’s particularly difficult to revive is the feeling of encountering a brand new arcade cabinet for the first time.

Imagine being a kid in the 1980s and slotting your first ever coin into Donkey Kong or Asteroids or Missile Command, hovering your fingers over the controls with no idea of what’s to come, no frame of reference for how this machine works. Gaming is so neatly categorised now, so heavily formalised in its genres and mechanics, that I find it difficult to imagine what that must have been like.

(Image credit: Pocket Moon Games)

Wormhole

The fundamentals of Wormhole are Basically Just Snake. You control a segmented line of pixels as it darts automatically across the screen, devouring dots that add more segments to your serpentine juggernaut as they are consumed. If your snake bumps into its own tail, the game ends. Wormhole drapes a fancier theme over these rules—you’re a giant space worm and the dots you devour are planets—but otherwise it’ll be instantly recognisable to anyone who owned a Nokia phone in the early 2000s.

Familiar, that is, except for all the things Wormhole adds. The most important is an energy bar that depletes as your worm moves, which will trigger a game over if it’s empty for too long. Consuming planets refills the bar, but planets appear and disappear at random, meaning you can miss one and run out of energy before reaching the next. Fortunately for your monstrous devourer of worlds, space is dotted with handy wormholes that you can take a shortcut through.

(Image credit: Pocket Moon Games)

Wormhole

This space warping element is one of the key ways in how Wormhole resets your comprehension of Snake, as you have to wrap your mind around Portal-style movement in an arcade environment. Moreover, these wormholesalsotend to shift around the level, while many levels have more than two wormholes in them, and you have to figure out which of them connect.

It’s like accidentally turning onto the wrong side of the motorway on your first driving lesson.

On top of this, Wormhole also throws random curveballs into levels with no warning or explanation. An Asteroids-style UFO that hovers around and runs away from you when you get near, what’s that about? A giant floating skull—what’s his deal? A big line of stars that cause the word “SUPERNOVA” to appear on screen if you collect them all. It sure looks rad, but what does itdo?

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To be clear, Wormhole isn’t some ingenious, cryptic masterpiece. It won’t take you too long to figure out the various effects each of these things have on the game. But the way they are introduced, combined with the speed that Wormhole plays at (levels often last less than thirty seconds) combine to provoke that sensory overload you want from a great arcade game. It’s like accidentally turning onto the wrong side of the motorway on your first driving lesson—there’s all this shit flying at you while you’re still trying to figure out how to shift through gears.

(Image credit: Pocket Moon Games)

Wormhole

(Image credit: Pocket Moon Games)

Wormhole

Nonetheless, with 100 levels to chomp through, which gradually add new wrinkles like bumpers you need to avoid, or a barrier that splits the level in two, Wormhole will keep you occupied for a good few hours. It’s a smart, accomplished game that, like Balatro or Derek Yu’s NES-inspired mixtapeUFO 50, takes a familiar archetype and reinvents it to feel new and surprising.

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