Snake Pass was one of our most anticipated indie games for the Switch in the weeks before the system’s launch. With a charming art style and a unique take on the platforming genre Snake Pass seemed to be the perfect game to complement Breath of the Wild and the other launch window games. In addition to its obvious charms, Snake Pass was also notable in being the first game to bring the Unreal Engine 4 to the Switch and was able to launch simultaneously with all of the other major platforms in spite of the particularly short window in which it was ported. The developers were kind enough to supply us with a review code to spend some time with the game a day early, so here are our initial impressions of and challenges we had with the game.
[UPDATE: Snake Pass received a 1.1 update today (Mar. 30) that fixed the rumble bug with both the Joy-Con and Pro Controller. The resolution issues do not seem to have been addressed yet.]
The charm that was obvious in the game’s previews is definitely present in Snake Pass‘ gameplay but it currently has some notable technical issues on the Switch that prevented us from playing the game for very long. The game’s use of HD Rumble is very overbearing in both handheld mode and with the Pro Controller to the point where it generates a lot of noise on its own in addition to rumbling quite vigorously. Sumo Digital is aware of the issue and say they are launching a patch soon to fix the rumble issues, but the most immediate and glaring issue with the game that they have yet to acknowledge is the sub-HD internal resolution in portable mode and sub-720p resolution in TV mode. Digital Foundry says that you get just 844×475 resolution in portable mode and 1200×675 in TV mode compared to the still sub-1080p 1536×864 you get on the PS4. While in both modes the blurriness is somewhat counteracted by some generous anti-aliasing, it’s better in TV mode than in portable mode where the resolution reduces it to a blurry mess hearkening back to Nintendo’s far inferior portable screens of the past. This extreme blurriness and pixelation prevented us from playing it in portable mode extensively without getting low-grade headaches. You can see an uncompressed version of the screenshot we captured from the top of the article here that demonstrates just how blurry the game can be.
Some of our other sundry thoughts on the game thus far as we wait for the technical issues to be patched:
- The learning curve in getting used to Noodle (the snake)’s unique mode of locomotion is quite steep and we’re not entirely convinced it’s not more cumbersome than it needs to be (more Surgeon Simulator than Mirror’s Edge as far as unique control schemes go), but you do improve considerably after using it for a few levels.
- The locomotion/platforming puzzles are quite solid and most gamers will have to particularly extend themselves if they want to collect the five hidden coins on each level.
- The art-style and graphics are nice in spite of the technical issues currently plaguing the Switch version. We’d definitely recommend picking the game up on a different platform like PC or PS4 Pro if you want to avoid resolution or frame-rate/frame-pacing issues at least for the near future.
- While such a huge multi-platform launch is admirable coming from an independent studio, the Nintendo Switch version could definitely have benefited from a couple more weeks of optimizations and polish.
We’ll keep you posted and update this impressions article should any updates come out for the Switch version of the game that improve its overall experience.