Crawler!

The Good
Here is a game, which has a basic objective, get your caterpillar to eat all the plants, yard by yard. Each yard brings out a new challenge with fewer spaces to cater for the ever-growing caterpillar. Thankfully you do get some bonus items to simmer down the otherwise aggravating difficulty, such as extra lives, shortening scissors, and others. And then there’s the option to get rid of the rocks if they are making the game a little too unfair. The sprite work has a nice mix of dithered floor textures and flat coloured objects.

The Bad
With a simple game comes the misfortune of bad controlling to ruin a good gaming experience. You can only use the left and right mouse buttons to steer the caterpillar. For driving games two buttons for clockwise and counter-clockwise work okay, but most Snake variants use directional buttons to determine which way the elongated character goes, so you’re likely to get confused and steer it the wrong way and crash, wasting your precious limited lives. It’s like left is down, up is right, and all that. While the help file does say that the game is keyboard compatible, this isn’t true at all. Every attempt to make it work with the game gets the player nowhere.

Adding to the frustration is the discrete jumpy frame rate, which makes you steer your caterpillar out of sync with bad timing, either one square too soon or too late.

The Bottom Line
Just when you think you’ve seen all the Snake variants in gaming, new and obscure ones seem to pop and crawl out, just like this one. Not the most balanced of games to go on your desktop, but if you love a good high score as much as an arcade gamer, it’s your way to go, assuming you can grab a copy and get it running on your PC. With caterpillars taking the stage on a Snake game, what comes next? Leeches? Earthworms? Giraffes? Surprise us.