Here's an adage as dog-eared and cheerily British as its subject; you wait ages for a classic platformer in the style of Rare's N64 classics and then two come along in quick succession. We're weeks away from the release of Yooka-Laylee, Playtonic's vibrant throwback to the Banjo-Kazooie series, but before then we have Snake Pass. It's similarly in thrall to a sugar-sweet flavour of game once popular at the turn of the century, full of colour and a disarming charm.
Its lead character Noodle the snake and his companion Doodle the hummingbird are keen students of the syllabus taught at the Rare School of Design in the late 90s, yet its anthropomorphism goes one step further than placing googly eyes on a couple of animals. Snake Pass takes the business of being a snake very seriously.
Rather than running and leaping across levels, here you slither across them, contorting yourself across and around obstacles to reach new areas. To gain forward momentum you must push down on the right trigger while sliding from side to side, and to work your way up a bamboo climbing frame you must coil yourself around it, tightening and loosening your body with the left trigger as you go. The execution is sublime, the animation masterly as it translates the tics of the natural world into the abstract of the puzzle platformer (something as true of Doodle as it is Noodle, the hummingbird darting around the screen as he draws your attention to wherever the level designers want to send you next).
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