What I like about indie games... Well, that's a wrong way to even start this paragraph as I like a lot of things about indie games in general! But one of the many great attributes they share is what I would like to call Essence. Not in any spiritual fashion, but more in the sense of squeezing the pure component of a game to its bare essentials. Who said you need top-notch graphical fidelity in every game? Plot or story of any kind? A lovely blend of mechanical features working together with an overarching narrative? Sometimes all you need is a simple idea, but honed to a sharp edge. Damn the looks, damn the narratives, just do that one thing VERY well.
SNKRX is for me a supreme example of this approach. It's Snake. Sort of. You know, the game where you grow bigger by consuming stuff? Only that it isn't Snake at all, other than that basic concept - growing a more and more hard-to-manage chain. What SNKRX is however is a roguelike RPG, in which you create a party of warriors, priests, sorcerers, rangers, and the like to battle hordes of enemies! The twist is, that all those mighty heroes are colored, rounded squares. And enemies are fat pixelated pills. And the arena is an empty void of greyness. It's abstract to the max, serving a greater purpose of clear, polished gameplay.
And the gameplay is thought out with great precision. As in a proper roguelike, no two runs will be the same. At the very beginning, you're given a meager amount of gold to pick from three presented choices of randomly drawn classes. Each has its function, be it classic damage dealers, supports, or healers, and comes in a great variety. Between each stage, which consists of multiple waves of enemies, you will be able to spend your hard-earned gold to acquire new 'party members' by adding them to your Snake formation. Even their position in the chain matters! Some are much more durable and can take the brunt of ramming into an enemy pill. Some have areas of effect, and placing them at a certain spot might be more beneficial to your strategy.
But even that is only the tip of the iceberg. Each Class has multiple characters - for example, a Warrior class can offer a simple, straightforward Swordsman, a more control-oriented Juggernaut, or a support in the form of a Squire. This matters, because having copies of the same class within your chain offers significant buffs based on the number of said copies. In the case of the Warrior class, having three Warriors would give everyone in the chain a hefty +25 Defence, greatly improving the chain's durability. Every class has those built-in synergies and there are heroes out there that are multiclass, to make filling in those buffs a little easier. With a choice of over 50 heroes, this becomes quite a rich experience!
Especially that you can also get copies of the same hero to level them up, reducing your chain size - as there is a limit! - while doubling the power of said hero. You can do that twice if you're fortunate. That final Level 3 unlocks, for each hero, a new, unique ability. Those are so powerful and game-changing that trying to chase those level-ups is always a worthy investment.
But what roguelike would present itself to a player without a selection of Relics? Well, items - strong passive buffs that help you formulate your build, and find a direction in which you want to grow your party. There are so, so many of them in this game, with strong, often interesting effects. And to make it even more formidable as a build option, most of those items can be enhanced with gold, leveling them up to unlock their full power. For example, Echo Barrage gives a rather puny 10% chance to make a copy of any of your Area of Effects attacks. Pathetic! But level this thing up to the max and now it's 30% to make three clones of your attack. Deadly! Plenty of those items become avaliable to you based on your squad composition. Having a Psyker or a Curser will grant you access to different item pools.
Enemies might be simple, colored pills, but they are no slouches in presenting a challenge. As the run progresses, you will find out that they also evolve to find new, annoying abilities to test you. Chasers can unleash a burst of speed. Miners will drop bombs that send projectiles around them. Chargers can prepare a ramming thrust that hits hard and can one-shot some of your weaker squares while tossing you over the arena like a wet noodle. Beefy elites will spawn with a fat life bar and an ability on cooldown to empower their lesser fellows.
Everything mixes so well together, with such fantastic attention to detail, that you can quickly forget that you're playing a game, in which a colorful chain of pixelated squares weave around blobs of colors trying to chase you down. It has a depth you might not find in many of its "better looking" contemporaries, injecting that "one more run" virus straight into the brain with ease. And so, I can only recommend this little gem. It might not be ground-breaking, but still offers a little fresh take on the genre with great polish and execution.

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