Portugues
Snakelike
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About the game
Snakelike takes the old snake game and drops it into a dungeon. You are a small, hungry snake in a maze of stone
halls drawn with plain text characters: # for walls, r for the rats you eat, B for the baddies that patrol the
corridors. Every rat makes you one segment longer, and your length is also your health, so growing is both the goal
and the armour. Touch a baddie with your head, or let one run into your tail the wrong way, and you lose a segment.
Lose the last one and the run is over.
Each floor is generated anew and the maps grow as you go down. You only see what is close to you (the rest stays dark until you explore it), and the stairs to the next floor appear only when every baddie on the floor is gone. On every fifth floor a two-tile boss chases your head. Lava kills at once, traps cost a segment, and three pick-ups are scattered on each floor: a shield that absorbs one hit, a burst of speed and a short phase through the walls.
Lee Reilly made Snakelike in 2026. The sounds are synthesised on the spot, so the game has no audio files and no images: everything on screen is text.
Playing it here
Click Play, then click once inside the game so it gets the keyboard, and press any key to start. Steer with the arrow keys or WASD; the snake never stops moving. Press Space to fire a piercing shot from your head, at the price of two tail segments, which kills every baddie in its line and chips a point off the boss. You need a length of at least three to shoot. The original game had an online high-score table; here it is replaced by a local one, so your best scores are kept in this browser only. A keyboard is needed.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys or WASD | steer the snake |
| Space | fire a piercing shot (costs 2 tail segments, needs length 3 or more) |
| Any key | start the game, continue after a message, restart after Game Over |
A few things worth knowing
Your body is a weapon. A baddie that walks into your body dies on the spot, so a long snake coiled in a corridor is safer than it looks. Lure them in instead of chasing them.
Shoot with care. Every shot costs two segments, which is two hits of health. Save it for a line of baddies or for the boss, and keep the shield for the moment you cannot avoid a hit.
Phase is an escape button. The ~ pick-up lets you pass through walls for three seconds. It is not the same as the
lava tile, which uses the same character and is fatal.
Credits and licence
Snakelike was written by Lee Reilly and is released under the MIT licence. It runs on Phaser 3 (Richard Davey and Phaser Studio Inc., MIT). The changes made for this site are the replacement of the online leaderboard by a local one and the removal of every request to other servers; the patch, the build script and the licence texts are linked from this page.